Skip to main content
Drink

Pickled Onions

Pickled onions preserved in vinegar with mace, cloves, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pickled Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Remove the skins from the onions.

  2. Rub the onions on a cloth until very dry.

Pack and pickle

  1. Place the onions in bottles with mace, cloves, and nutmeg pieces.

  2. Boil the vinegar with salt and pour it over the onions.

  3. Once cooled, cork the bottles tightly and cover with a bladder and leather.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. White wine + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Onion + white winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,535 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

Onions
Form the main body of the pickle and absorb the vinegar flavour.
White wine vinegar
Provides the acid that preserves and sharpens the onions.
Nutmeg
Adds warm, aromatic flavour to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Drying the onions thoroughly. Any moisture left on the onion surface dilutes the vinegar and can encourage spoilage, so the onions should be rubbed very dry before they go into the bottles.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mace, clove, nutmeg, white wine, vinegar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mace, clove, nutmeg, white wine, 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.

More pickled onions recipes

and Apples 3and Cucumbers 3 See all 163 →

You might also like

Raspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesWine WheyWine Whey111 recipesRaisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesEgg WineEgg Wine58 recipes