Skip to main content
Main

To Pickle Beet Roots

A pickled beetroot dish made with vinegar, spices, horseradish, onions, ginger, and sweet oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

To Pickle Beet Roots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pickle

  1. Boil the beet roots until three-quarters cooked, then slice them into 1-inch thick pieces.

  2. In a pot, combine vinegar, allspice, cloves, mace, black pepper, horseradish, onions, eschalots, ginger, salt, and bay leaves.

  3. Boil the mixture for 20 minutes, then strain it and let it cool.

  4. Once cool, add a little bruised cochineal to the pickle.

Pickle and seal

  1. Place the beet slices into jars, pour the pickle over them, add a small amount of sweet oil on top, and seal the jars tightly.

Serve

  1. To serve, mix sweet oil, mustard, some of the pickling liquid, and a little sifted sugar.

  2. Arrange the beet slices in a deep plate and pour the mixture over them.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Allspice + horseradishtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Beet roots
Form the main body of the pickle, becoming tender and absorbing the flavoured vinegar.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickle.
Onions
Add savoury depth and aromatic sweetness to the pickling liquid.
Mustard
Adds sharp pungency to the serving dressing that balances the sweetness.
Sifted sugar
Adds sweetness to the serving dressing, offsetting the vinegar's sharpness.

The step that matters

Cooling the pickle before adding cochineal. Cochineal colour is heat-sensitive and can fade or change when added to boiling liquid, so the pickle should be cooled first.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, allspice, clove, pepper, horseradish, onion, ginger):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, allspice, clove, pepper, horseradish, onion, 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.

You might also like

Horseradish SauceHorseradish Sauce17 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes