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Cucumber Vinegar

A vinegar flavored with cucumbers, onions, shallots, garlic, pepper, and cayenne, steeped for four days and bottled with peppercorns.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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

Prepare

  1. Slice the cucumbers and onions thinly.

  2. Combine them in a pan with shallots, garlic, salt, ground pepper, and cayenne pepper.

  3. Add the vinegar and let it stand for 4 days.

Strain and bottle

  1. Strain the mixture through a flannel bag.

  2. Bottle the vinegar, adding 20 peppercorns to each bottle.

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 bulk of the flavoring, releasing their juices into the vinegar as it stands.
Onions
Add pungency and savoury depth that mellows during the standing period.
Shallots
Contribute a mild, sweet onion flavor that blends into the vinegar.
Garlic
Adds sharp aroma and pungency that infuses into the vinegar.
Vinegar
Acts as the liquid base that extracts and preserves the flavors of the vegetables.

The step that matters

Letting the mixture stand for 4 days. The vinegar needs time to draw flavor out of the sliced vegetables and spices. Too short a steep leaves the vinegar weak and unbalanced, while the vegetables are needed to stay submerged so they do not spoil at the surface.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Kalefits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, shallot, garlic, pepper, 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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