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Salad

Pickled Onions and Cucumbers

A pickled relish of cucumbers and onions seasoned with salt, sugar, mustard, ginger, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,281 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Pickled Onions and Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine cucumbers, chopped onions, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Let the mixture stand for one hour, then drain off the water.

  3. Add sugar, mustard, ginger, and pepper to the drained vegetables, then mix well and adjust seasoning with additional salt if desired.

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

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

  2. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Ginger + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

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

  5. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 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
Provide the crisp, watery bulk that the salt draws moisture from.
Onions
Add sharp pungency that mellows during pickling and brings aroma to the dish.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the pickling with sweetness.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the vegetables, firming them and seasoning the mixture.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand for one hour, then drain off the water. Salt draws water out of the cucumbers and onions through osmosis. Draining that liquid before adding the sugar and spices keeps the pickles crisp and stops them from becoming diluted and soggy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Radishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, sugar, mustard, ginger, 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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