Name: Sweet Pickles
Ingredients: 1 to 4 lbs sugar; 1 quart vinegar; light brown sugar or maple sugar; cinnamon; cloves; allspice; mace; ginger; fruits or vegetables suitable for preserving (e.g., apples, melon rinds, cucumbers, pears, plums, peaches)

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Sweet Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

Mix sugar and vinegar in a pot to prepare the syrup.
Bring the syrup to a boil.

Cook and jar

Add the prepared fruits or vegetables to the boiling syrup.
Boil until tender, then transfer to jars and let cool.
Alternatively, pour boiling syrup over the pickles, let sit overnight, drain, boil the syrup, and repeat for 4 to 5 days before sealing.

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.

Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,189 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,874 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,536 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,380 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,038 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar: Sweetens the pickling syrup and helps preserve the fruit or vegetables.
Vinegar: Provides acidity that gives the pickles their sharp flavour and helps preserve them.
Fruits or vegetables: The main pickled ingredient, which softens and absorbs the sweet-sour syrup as it cooks.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, clove, allspice, ginger, apple):

Nutmegfits better
Cardamomfits better
Turmericfits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, clove, allspice, ginger, apple. 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.