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To Pickle Cucumbers and Onions Sliced

A pickled cucumber and onion dish using young cucumbers, coarse sea salt, boiling vinegar, and vine leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,734 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyl acetate, which smells fruit. The science ↓

To Pickle Cucumbers and Onions Sliced

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Slice the cucumbers and sprinkle coarse sea salt over them.

  2. Let them sit for a week, then drain for 5-6 hours.

Pickle

  1. Place them in a stone jar and pour boiling vinegar over them.

  2. Cover with vine leaves and heat over a fire.

  3. If they are not a good green color, pour the vinegar into another jar, heat it until boiling, and pour it over the cucumbers again, covering with fresh leaves.

  4. Repeat until the desired color is achieved.

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 + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Young cucumbers (gerkins)
Provide the main vegetable; salting and draining firm them and draw out moisture before pickling.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers, firming their texture and preparing them to take up vinegar.
Boiling vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickle.

The step that matters

Repeating the vinegar pour until the color is right. Heat and acid change the green color of cucumbers over time, and the vinegar must be brought back to a full boil each time so the pour is hot enough to work.

“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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