Name: Pickled Gherkins
Ingredients: 50 to 100 gherkins; coarse sea salt; cloves; allspice; peppercorns; cold vinegar

Why it works: Clove and allspice 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 ↓

Pickled Gherkins

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Choose gherkins that are similar in size.
Place gherkins in glass bottles.
Add salt, cloves, allspice, and peppercorns to the bottles.

Pickle and store

Fill the bottles with cold vinegar.
Seal the bottles tightly and store in a dry place.

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.

Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,874 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Allspice + vinegartop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,548 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).
Clove + vinegartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,386 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Gherkins: Form the pickled product itself, providing the crisp texture and main body of the dish.
Cold vinegar: Provides acidity that preserves the gherkins and gives them their sharp, tangy flavour.
Coarse sea salt: Draws moisture out of the gherkins and seasons them as they cure.

“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.