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Pickles

A pickled melon recipe using sugar, cider vinegar, cloves, cinnamon, onions, garlic, and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar, cider vinegar, cloves, and cinnamon in a pan and boil the mixture.

  2. Add melons to the boiling vinegar until covered and cook for 15 minutes.

Pickle and store

  1. Transfer the melons to jars, pour the vinegar over them, and let sit overnight.

  2. Strain the vinegar from the melons, boil it again, and pour it back over the melons.

  3. Repeat boiling the vinegar daily until the melons are done.

  4. After the final boil, let the pickles cool, cover jars with sturdy paper, tie them down, and store in a dry cupboard.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  4. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the pickling liquid and balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Cider vinegar
Acidic base that preserves the melons and gives the pickle its tang.
Cloves
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the pickling liquid.
Cinnamon
Adds sweet, warm aroma to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Repeating the daily boil. Reboiling the vinegar each day keeps the brine hot enough to soften and preserve the melons over several days. Letting it cool too early or skipping a boil can leave the melons under-processed and prone to spoiling.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cider, vinegar, clove, cinnamon, melon, garlic):

  1. Cucumberfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cider, vinegar, clove, cinnamon, melon, garlic. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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