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Cucumber Pickles

A preserved cucumber dish made with vinegar, sugar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the cucumbers and cover them with boiling water; let them sit for two days.

  2. Place the cucumbers in jars with whole spices.

Pickle

  1. Boil the vinegar and sweeten it with sugar in the proportion of 1 teacup of sugar to 1 gallon of vinegar.

  2. Pour the hot vinegar over the cucumbers in the jars.

  3. Seal the jars if you plan to keep the pickles through the summer.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the body of the pickle, becoming crisp and firm when cured in brine.
Vinegar
Provides the sour acidity that preserves the cucumbers and gives the pickle its tang.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.
Whole black pepper
Adds a sharp, aromatic warmth infused into the pickling liquid.
Allspice
Adds warm, aromatic flavour that infuses the pickles.
Cinnamon
Adds sweet, woody aroma to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Covering the cucumbers with boiling water and letting them sit for two days. Cucumbers held in hot water for a long period can soften if the water cools or the timing drifts, so the soak needs careful attention to keep them firm before the vinegar is added.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, vinegar, pepper, allspice, clove, cinnamon):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Horseradishfits about as well
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, pepper, allspice, clove, cinnamon. 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 →

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