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Sour Pickles

A pickle recipe using cider vinegar, water, brown sugar, sea salt, mustard, celery and nasturtium seeds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Sour Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Make the brine

  1. Boil the cider vinegar, water, brown sugar, and coarse sea salt for ten minutes, then skim well.

  2. When the mixture is cold, make a smooth paste with the ground mustard and a little of the boiled vinegar.

  3. Mix the mustard paste with the remaining vinegar mixture and pour it into a jar.

Add the pickles

  1. Wash and dry enough medium-sized pickles to fill the jar, leaving space below the vinegar.

  2. Sprinkle the pickles with celery and nasturtium seeds.

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. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  3. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cider + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,414 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cider vinegar
Provides the sour acidity that defines the pickle and preserves the cucumbers.
Brown sugar
Balances the sharp acidity with sweetness and adds a molasses depth to the brine.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the brine and helps draw flavour into the pickles.
Ground mustard
Adds pungent flavour and thickens the brine when mixed into a paste.
Medium-sized pickles
The vegetable being pickled, which absorbs the brine's acidity and sweetness.

The step that matters

Make the mustard paste while the mixture is cold. Mixing ground mustard into hot liquid can make it clump and turn bitter, so it should be blended into a smooth paste first and combined once the brine has cooled.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cider, vinegar, sugar, mustard):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, vinegar, sugar, mustard. 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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