Skip to main content
Drink

Cucumber Pickles

A brine of vinegar, salt, sugar, mustard seed, pepper, and alum preserves cucumbers with peppers and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Horseradish and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the cucumbers in cold water and dry them.

  2. Layer the cucumbers with green peppers and thinly sliced horseradish in a jar.

Make the brine and pickle

  1. In a pot, combine vinegar, coarse sea salt, sugar, white mustard seed, black pepper, and alum.

  2. Boil the mixture and pour it over the cucumbers hot for three consecutive days.

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 + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

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

  4. Cucumber + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 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

Cucumbers
Form the crisp, bulky body of the pickles that absorb the brine.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the pickles and gives them their sharp flavor.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the brine and helps draw flavor into the cucumbers.
White mustard seed
Adds pungent, earthy flavor to the brine.
Horseradish
Contributes sharp, pungent heat that carries into the pickles.

The step that matters

Pouring the boiling brine over the cucumbers for three days. The brine must be hot and repeated over several days so the cucumbers gradually take up flavor and acidity. Pouring it cool or skipping days would leave the pickles less seasoned and less well preserved.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, pepper, horseradish, vinegar, sugar, mustard. 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.

More cucumber pickles recipes

Sweet 23Green 9Spiced 9Small 7Sliced 6Sour 5 See all 334 →

You might also like

Raspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesSugar VinegarSugar Vinegar20 recipesVegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipes