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Small Cucumber Pickles

Pickled small cucumbers with onions, pepper, garlic, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Small Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Brine

  1. Wash cucumbers and soak them in a brine of 1 cup salt and 1 quart water for 24 hours.

Pack and pickle

  1. Remove cucumbers from brine, rinse in fresh water, pack them in glass jars with small white onions, red pepper, and garlic.

  2. Bring vinegar to a boil.

  3. Fill jars with hot vinegar, sealing them immediately.

  4. Check jars periodically and top off with boiling vinegar if needed.

  5. Add a bit of horseradish to each jar to prevent mold.

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 + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together640 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Garlic + horseradishtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together719 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Small cucumbers
Form the pickle itself, firm and crisp after brining in salt.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and seasons them during the 24-hour brine.
Strong white vinegar
Provides the sour acidity that preserves and flavors the pickles.

The step that matters

Fill jars with hot vinegar and seal immediately. Hot vinegar and prompt sealing help drive air out and keep the jars safely closed. Topping off with boiling vinegar keeps the cucumbers submerged, since exposed pickles spoil more easily.

Swap the horseradish

The recipe marks horseradish as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, onion, pepper, clove, garlic, vinegar):

  1. Chivefits about as well
  2. Broccolifits about as well
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, onion, pepper, clove, garlic, 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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