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Sweet Pickles

Pickled cucumbers and onions with shallots, garlic, salt, pepper, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Sweet Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and slice the cucumbers and onions.

  2. Put them in a stone jar with shallots, garlic, salt, pepper, and cayenne.

Rest, boil and cool

  1. Leave the mixture for four days.

  2. Boil the mixture, then let it cool.

Strain and bottle

  1. Strain until clear and bottle for use.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Cucumber + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,556 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Shallot + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 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

Cucumbers
Make up the bulk of the pickle and release moisture into the mixture.
Onions
Add sharp, sweet flavour that mellows during the resting time.
Shallots
Add a milder onion aroma that blends with the onions.
Cayenne
Adds gentle heat to the finished pickle.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture, then let it cool. Boiling heats the vegetables and the liquid they have released, softening them and blending the flavours. Letting it cool before straining makes the liquid easier to handle and clear.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, shallot, garlic, pepper):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Kalefits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, shallot, garlic, 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.

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