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Onions, Fielded

Pickled onions flavored with vinegar, horseradish, peppercorns, ginger, and optional tarragon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and tarragon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 73 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Onions, Fielded

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the onions in salt water for a few hours.

  2. Peel the onions carefully without cutting the bulbs.

Pickle

  1. Place the onions in jars and add vinegar, horseradish, peppercorns, ginger, and tarragon.

  2. Seal the jars and let them sit for three days.

  3. After three days, pour off the vinegar and boil it.

  4. Pour the boiled vinegar back over the onions when cool.

  5. Seal the jars again for storage.

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. Horseradish + tarragontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together73 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Vinegar + tarragontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,595 recipes

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

  5. White wine + tarragontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together409 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Small silver onions
Form the body of the pickle, staying firm and crisp as they absorb the vinegar flavour.
White wine vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the onions and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Horseradish
Adds pungent heat that mellows in the vinegar and gives the pickle its bite.
White peppercorns
Contribute a mild, lingering warmth and aromatic spice to the brine.

The step that matters

Peel the onions without cutting the bulbs. Cutting the bulb opens the layers to the brine, which can soften them and let them spoil or turn mushy during the long soak and pickling.

Swap the tarragon

The recipe marks tarragon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, white wine, vinegar, horseradish, ginger):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Turmericfits about as well
  3. Tarragonthe original
  4. Clovefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, white wine, vinegar, horseradish, 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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