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Preserved Cucumbers, or Green Gerkins, As Fine Wet and Dry Sweetmeats

A method for preserving small cucumbers or gherkins in a sweet syrup of salt, water, and loaf sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,112 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Preserved Cucumbers, or Green Gerkins, As Fine Wet and Dry Sweetmeats

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Pick the greenest, unspotted small cucumbers or gherkins.

  2. Soak them in salt and water for two days and nights.

  3. Boil them briefly in fresh water, then soak overnight in the same water.

Make the syrup

  1. Drain the cucumbers into a saucepan and add enough water to cover them.

  2. Add 1 pound of loaf sugar for every pint of water.

  3. Boil covered for 5 minutes, then return them to the soaking vessel with the syrup.

Finish

  1. Let them sit until the next day.

  2. For the next 3-4 days, gently boil them for a few minutes each day.

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 + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,112 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Small cucumbers or gherkins
The vegetable being preserved; its firm texture is what the soaking and syrup work on.
Salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers during soaking, helping them firm up and stay crisp.
Loaf sugar
Forms the syrup that sweetens the cucumbers and helps preserve them.

The step that matters

Gently boiling the cucumbers in the syrup. Hard, rapid boiling breaks down the cell walls and makes the cucumbers soft and mushy. Keeping the heat gentle and the boils short lets them stay firm while the syrup slowly penetrates.

“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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