Name: Excellent Chow-chow
Ingredients: 1 quart vinegar; ¼ pound mustard (prepared for table use); 2 ounces ginger; 2 ounces white pepper; a few cloves; 1 dozen large cucumbers, peeled and sliced; a handful of coarse sea salt

Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Excellent Chow-chow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Boil the vinegar with mustard, ginger, white pepper, and cloves.
Place the sliced cucumbers in a sieve and sprinkle with salt; let them stand for 10 minutes.

Pack and seal

Pack the cucumbers into jars.
Once the vinegar mixture is cool, pour it over the cucumbers and seal the jars tightly.

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.

Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,038 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Mustard + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,281 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14,067 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Mustard + clovetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,829 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
Vinegar + cucumbertop 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

Vinegar: Provides the sharp acidity that preserves the pickle and gives it its tang.
Cucumbers: Make up the bulk of the pickle and supply its crisp, watery texture.
Mustard: Adds a sharp, pungent flavor that balances the acidity of the vinegar.
Ginger: Contributes a warm, aromatic spice flavor to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Let the vinegar cool before pouring it over the cucumbers. Hot liquid softens raw cucumbers and makes them limp, so letting the vinegar mixture cool first helps keep the pickles crisp.

Swap the white pepper

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

Allspicefits better
Cinnamonfits better
Turmericfits better
White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, mustard, ginger, clove, cucumber. 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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Excellent Chow-chow