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Preserve

To Preserve Cucumbers

A method of preserving cucumbers by brining, boiling, and sweetening them in a syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Preserve Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Cut cucumbers into pieces, keeping some whole.

  2. Place them in brine with a cabbage leaf on top.

  3. Simmer cucumbers in water with a little coarse sea salt until tender.

  4. Remove seeds from cucumbers.

  5. Soak cucumbers in cold water for 2-3 days to remove salt.

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup with 1 pound of refined sugar and ½ cup of spring water.

  2. Boil and skim the syrup.

  3. Add the thin rind of a lemon and 1 ounce of scraped white ginger to the syrup.

  4. Cook until slightly thickened.

  5. Let the syrup cool.

Pickle

  1. Add the cleaned cucumbers.

  2. Boil them in the syrup.

  3. Repeat boiling every three days for about two weeks.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  2. Cucumber + cabbagetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together722 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Cabbage + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together545 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Cucumber + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Cucumber + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together973 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

Green turk cucumbers
Form the main body of the pickle and absorb the syrup as they cook.
Refined sugar
Sweetens the pickle and, when cooked into syrup, preserves the cucumbers.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out water and firms the cucumbers during the initial brining and simmering.
Lemon rind
Adds bright aromatic oils that brighten the sweet syrup.
White ginger
Adds warm, aromatic pungency that balances the sweetness of the syrup.

The step that matters

Soaking to remove salt. Cucumbers held in salt and brine must be soaked long enough to remove the salt; otherwise the syrup will not penetrate properly and the pickle may taste harsh or overly salty.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, sugar, lemon, ginger):

  1. Broccolifits better
  2. Radishfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, sugar, lemon, ginger. 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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