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Pickles, &C

A method for pickling cucumbers with vinegar, spices, and brine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pickles, &C

Ingredients

Directions

Make the brine and soak

  1. Make a strong brine with salt and water that will float an egg; add fine curled parsley and let it stand for a week.

  2. Make a fresh brine and let it stand for another week; then drain and soak in spring water for three days, changing the water each day.

  3. Scald the parsley in hard water until it turns green, then drain.

Pickle and jar

  1. Boil enough distilled vinegar to cover the parsley with mace, nutmeg, and shallots; let it cool and pour over the parsley with horseradish slices, then cover.

  2. Boil the salt with water and pour it hot over the cucumbers; cover for three hours.

  3. Remove cucumbers, wrap in a cloth until cool, then place in a pan with vinegar, mace, ginger, black pepper, and salt; simmer until they begin to turn green.

  4. Transfer to jars with scraped horseradish and cover.

  5. For small cucumbers, pour boiling brine over them, cover, and let stand overnight; the next day, stir gently, drain, and dry.

  6. Make a pickle with vinegar, sliced ginger, Cayenne, and black pepper; when boiling, add cucumbers, cover, and boil for three minutes.

  7. Place cucumbers in jars with the pickle and cover tightly.

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. Shallot + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cucumber + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together640 recipes

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

  3. Cucumber + shallottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together264 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Nutmeg + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and firms their texture for pickling.
Distilled vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the cucumbers and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Cucumbers
The main vegetable, which softens in brine and takes on the pickle flavour.
Shallots
Add a mild savoury onion flavour to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Boiling the cucumbers in the pickle for three minutes. Boiling briefly heats the cucumbers through so the pickle penetrates, but boiling too long softens them and dulls their crispness.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, vinegar, nutmeg, shallot, horseradish, ginger, pepper):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, vinegar, nutmeg, shallot, horseradish, ginger, 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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