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To Pickle Onions

A method of pickling small onions in vinegar with mace, clove, nutmeg, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

To Pickle Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Boil onions in spring water with salt.

  2. Strain and remove three outer layers of the onions.

  3. Dry the onions by rubbing them with a cloth.

Pack and pickle

  1. Place onions in bottles with mace, clove, and nutmeg pieces.

  2. Boil vinegar with a little salt and pour over the onions.

  3. Seal bottles tightly and cover with bladder and leather.

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 + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. White wine + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Onion + white winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,535 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Small onions
Form the main body of the pickle and absorb the vinegar's flavour.
Double distilled white wine vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the onions and gives them their sharp taste.
Blades of mace
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour to the pickling liquid and onions.
Nutmeg
Contributes a warm, aromatic spice note to the finished onions.

The step that matters

Dry the onions by rubbing them with a cloth. Surface moisture left on the onions dilutes the vinegar and can encourage spoilage, so they should be thoroughly dried before packing into bottles.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mace, clove, nutmeg, white wine, vinegar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mace, clove, nutmeg, white wine, vinegar. 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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