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Pickled Artichokes

Pickled artichokes preserved in a vinegar brine with salt, pepper, sugar, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Artichoke and cinnamon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Pickled Artichokes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the artichokes

  1. Wash and scrape the artichokes, cutting the larger ones in half.

  2. Cover with water, drain, and measure the water.

Make the pickling liquid

  1. Take the same quantity of vinegar and add salt, black pepper, sugar, and cinnamon.

  2. Pour the mixture over the artichokes in a granite kettle.

  3. Boil for about 5 minutes.

Store

  1. For immediate use, place in a crock like beet pickles.

  2. For long-term storage, put in air-tight jars.

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. Artichoke + cinnamontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together30 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Pepper + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Artichoke + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,170 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Artichokes
The main vegetable, which is pickled whole or halved and keeps its firm texture in the brine.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the artichokes and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with a mild sweetness.

The step that matters

Boil for about 5 minutes. Boiling the artichokes in the vinegar mixture heats them through so the brine penetrates. Overboiling makes the artichokes soft and mushy, so timing matters.

Swap the cinnamon

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Garlicfits about as well
  4. Cinnamonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against artichoke, vinegar, pepper, sugar. 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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