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Cucumber Vinegar

A pickled cucumber relish made with vinegar, onions, shallots, garlic, cayenne, white pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Cucumber Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place the cucumbers, onions, shallots, garlic, cayenne pepper, white pepper, and salt in a jar.

  2. Pour in the vinegar and let it stand for four days.

  3. Strain the mixture and bottle it with some whole pepper.

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

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Cucumber + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,556 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Shallot + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, bulk body of the pickle that softens slightly as it marinates in vinegar.
Vinegar
Acidifies and preserves the vegetables while carrying their flavour through the pickle.
Onions
Add sharpness and aroma that mellow during the long soak in vinegar.

The step that matters

Letting it stand for four days. The vinegar needs time to penetrate the sliced cucumbers and onions and balance their flavours. Too short a soak leaves the pickle harsh and under-flavoured, while the acid does the work of preserving it.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, vinegar, onion, shallot, garlic, 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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