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Pickled Onions

Pickled onions boiled in milk, then pickled in a vinegar mixture with mace, cinnamon, red peppers, sea salt, and alum.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,890 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Pickled Onions

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the onions

  1. Peel the small onions and boil them in milk for 10 minutes.

  2. Drain the onions and pour hot water over them.

Pickle

  1. Heat 1 gallon of vinegar with ½ ounce of mace, ½ ounce of cinnamon, some small red peppers, ½ cup of coarse sea salt, and ½ ounce of alum in a pot until scalding hot.

  2. Pour the hot mixture over the onions and cover tightly until cold.

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. Cinnamon + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

  4. Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Small onions
Form the main body of the pickle, becoming tender and mild as they soak in the brine.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the onions and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Alum
Helps the onions stay firm and crisp during pickling.

The step that matters

Pour the hot mixture over the onions and cover tightly until cold. The hot pickling liquid must be poured over the drained onions while still scalding, and the cover kept on while it cools. Trapping the heat and steam helps the brine penetrate evenly and keeps the onions from drying or softening unevenly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Clovefits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, vinegar, cinnamon, 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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