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Dessert

Dill Pickles

A jar of cucumbers pickled with dill, garlic, salt, vinegar, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Dill and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 530 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Dill Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Pack the jar

  1. Place dill horseradish roots or leaves and a clove of garlic in the bottom of a jar.

  2. Fill the jar with cucumbers.

  3. Add more dill horseradish and garlic on top of the cucumbers.

Brine and seal

  1. Pour 1-2 gallons of boiling water over the pickles.

  2. Add 1-2 cups of coarse sea salt and 1 cup of vinegar while hot.

  3. Seal the jar to store.

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. Dill + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together530 recipes

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

  2. Garlic + cucumbertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,556 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Cucumber + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  4. Dill + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together187 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Dill + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together943 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
The main vegetable, which takes on the flavour of the brine as it stands.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the brine and helps preserve the cucumbers.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the pickles.
Garlic
Adds a pungent aroma to the pickles.
Dill
Adds a herbal aroma to the pickles.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (dill, garlic, cucumber, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Corianderfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against dill, garlic, cucumber, vinegar. 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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