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Pickles

A brined pickle recipe using salt, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the brine

  1. Dissolve salt in water and let pickles stand in the brine for 30 hours.

Pack the jars

  1. Drain and wash the pickles, then place them in glass jars.

  2. Add a few whole spices, red peppers, and cinnamon sticks to the jars with pickles.

Make the spiced vinegar and seal

  1. Heat vinegar on the stove.

  2. Tie black pepper, dill, cloves, allspice, and any additional whole spices in a bag and boil in the vinegar for 10 minutes.

  3. Pour the hot vinegar over the pickles to fill the jars and seal them.

  4. If desired, add horseradish to help preserve the vinegar.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Dill + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together134 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Allspice + horseradishtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 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

Pickles
Form the main body of the jarred product, absorbing the brine and vinegar flavours.
Salt
Draws water out of the pickles and seasons them during the brine stage.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the pickles and gives them their sharp flavour.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar, adding sweetness to taste.

The step that matters

Pour the hot vinegar over the pickles to fill the jars and seal them.. The vinegar must fill the jars completely so the pickles stay submerged, since exposed pickles can spoil. Hot vinegar also helps seal the jars.

Swap the horseradish

The recipe marks horseradish as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, dill, clove, sugar, allspice, cinnamon, vinegar):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Horseradishthe original
  4. Carrotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, dill, clove, sugar, allspice, cinnamon, 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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