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To Pickle Onions

A method for pickling small onions using salt, vinegar, and spices.

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

To Pickle Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Select dry small onions and place them in a pot.

  2. Cover the onions with spring water and add ½ cup of coarse sea salt.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  4. Strain the onions and remove three outer layers.

  5. Place the onions on a cloth and rub them until very dry.

Pack and seal

  1. Pack the onions into bottles with blades of mace, cloves, and pieces of nutmeg.

  2. Boil the white wine vinegar with a little salt and pour the hot vinegar over the onions.

  3. Once cooled, cork the bottles tightly.

  4. Cover the bottles with 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

Small onions
Provide the main body of the pickle, which softens and takes on the vinegar flavour.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the onions, helping them stay firm and dry before pickling.
Double distilled white wine vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the onions and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour to the pickling liquid.
Cloves
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the pickled onions.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the pickled onions.

The step that matters

Rub the onions until very dry. Any moisture left on the onions dilutes the vinegar and can encourage spoilage, so the onions must be thoroughly dried before they go into the bottles.

Swap the onion

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

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

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