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To Pickle Cucumbers and Onions Sliced

A pickled cucumber and onion dish made by slicing, salting, draining, and preserving in boiling vinegar with pepper and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,050 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

To Pickle Cucumbers and Onions Sliced

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice cucumbers and onions thickly.

  2. Sprinkle salt over the slices and let them sit overnight.

  3. Drain the vegetables for 5-6 hours.

Pickle

  1. Place them in a stone jar and pour boiling vinegar over them.

  2. Keep the jar in a warm place.

  3. Repeat pouring boiling vinegar over them until they turn green.

  4. For the last time, add pepper and ginger before sealing the jar.

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. Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

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

  2. Cucumber + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  3. Pepper + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

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

  4. Onion + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,595 recipes

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

  5. Cucumber + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together973 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

Cucumbers
Provide the main crisp, watery body that salt firms up and vinegar preserves.
Onions
Add sharp, pungent flavour that mellows as they soak in the vinegar.
Boiling vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens flavour and preserves the vegetables.
Ginger
Adds warm, aromatic spice to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Draining after salting. Salt draws water out of the cucumbers and onions. Draining for the full time removes that liquid, so the vegetables stay crisp and the vinegar is not watered down.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, onion, vinegar, pepper):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, onion, vinegar, pepper. 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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