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Pickled Cucumber

A cucumber pickle made by salting, brining with vinegar, and fermenting under vine leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,734 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyl acetate, which smells fruit. The science ↓

Pickled Cucumber

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the cucumbers

  1. Lay cucumbers in a dish and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  2. Let them stand for 8 hours.

Pack in vinegar

  1. Drain the cucumbers and place them in a jar.

  2. Pour boiling vinegar over the cucumbers.

  3. Cover the jar with vine leaves and place it near the fire.

Refresh to green

  1. If cucumbers are not sufficiently green, strain the vinegar.

  2. Boil the vinegar.

  3. Pour it over the cucumbers again, covering with fresh leaves.

  4. Repeat until cucumbers reach the desired green color.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp body that is preserved and flavoured by the pickling liquid.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture so the cucumbers firm up and can take in the vinegar.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens flavour and helps preserve the cucumbers.

The step that matters

Keeping the vinegar boiling when refreshing the cucumbers. Heat and acid break down the green chlorophyll in cucumbers, so greenness fades with prolonged hot acid. Using freshly boiled vinegar and covering the jar to hold heat helps each pour work quickly, reducing how long the cucumbers sit in hot acid.

“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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