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Cucumber Chow-chow

A pickled cucumber relish with peppers, onions, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cucumber Chow-chow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Sprinkle the chopped cucumbers, green peppers, and onions with coarse sea salt and let them stand overnight.

  2. In the morning, press out the salt and place the vegetables into stone jars.

  3. Mix the grated horseradish with the cucumbers in the jars.

Make the pickling liquid

  1. In a pot, combine the vinegar with the black pepper, allspice, cloves, ground mustard, black mustard seed, and celery seed.

  2. Boil the mixture for 10 minutes, then let it cool.

Combine and pack

  1. Pour the cooled vinegar mixture over the cucumbers in the jars.

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. Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  5. Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Make up the bulk of the pickle and provide its crisp, fresh texture.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the vegetables, firming them and making them less watery.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the vegetables and gives the pickle its sharp flavor.
Black mustard seed
Adds sharp, pungent heat and a nutty bite to the pickling liquid.
Grated horseradish
Contributes pungent, sharp heat that mellows as the pickle sits.

The step that matters

Pressing out the salt after the overnight rest. Salt draws water out of the vegetables. If too much salt stays in them, the pickle becomes overly salty, while thorough pressing keeps the vegetables crisp and the brine balanced.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, pepper, allspice, clove, mustard, horseradish, celery):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, pepper, allspice, clove, mustard, horseradish, celery. 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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