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Cucumber-Ketchup

A preserved cucumber condiment made with salt, spices, and a boiled spice mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cucumber-Ketchup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Pare and slice the cucumbers, then mash them with your hand.

  2. Add coarse sea salt and let them stand overnight.

Make the ketchup

  1. Drain off the liquid and boil it with lemon peel, mace, cloves, bruised white peppercorns, a little horseradish, shallots, and sliced ginger.

  2. Strain the mixture and let it cool.

  3. Pour it into bottles with the mace, cloves, and peppercorns, but leave out the horseradish, ginger, and shallots.

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 + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cucumber + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together640 recipes

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

  4. Cucumber + shallottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together264 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Large old cucumbers
Form the main body of the ketchup and give it its bulk and liquid.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers, concentrating their flavour and firming their texture.
Shallots
Add a mild savoury, aromatic onion note to the boiled liquid.
Ginger
Adds a warm, aromatic spice note to the boiled liquid.

The step that matters

Salting and standing overnight. Salt draws liquid out of the cucumbers through osmosis. Letting them stand long enough lets this liquid drain, which is what you boil and flavour. Skipping or shortening the rest leaves the cucumbers wetter and the ketchup thinner and less concentrated.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, lemon, clove, horseradish, shallot, ginger):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, lemon, clove, horseradish, shallot, 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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