Skip to main content
Main

French Pickle

A pickled cucumber dish with onions, vinegar, sherry, soy sauce, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cucumber and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,050 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

French Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the cucumbers about ½ inch thick, removing the seeds.

  2. Slice the onions, place them in a dish, sprinkle salt over them, and let them stand for 12 hours.

Pickle and age

  1. Drain the onions well and place them in a jar with the vinegar, sherry, soy sauce, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Seal the jar with a bladder and let it sit for one month before using.

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. Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

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

  2. Cucumber + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Sherry + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together660 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  5. Cucumber + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,991 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the bulk of the pickle and stay crisp-textured as they cure in the brine.
Onions
Add pungency and sweetness, softened somewhat by the salt and the long soak.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that preserves the vegetables and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Salt
Draws moisture out of the onions and seasons the vegetables before pickling.
Indian soy sauce
Adds savoury depth and salty umami to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Draining the onions well after salting. Salt draws water out of the onions; any liquid left clinging to them dilutes the vinegar brine and weakens its acidity and preservative effect.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, sauce, sherry, vinegar, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, sauce, sherry, vinegar, pepper. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes