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Cucumber Pickles

A pickled cucumber dish flavored with cloves, horseradish, allspice, black pepper, mustard seed, red peppers, celery seed, onions, sugar, mace, and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and mustard 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 Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the cucumbers

  1. Let cucumbers stand in salted water for one day and night.

Pack and rest

  1. Drain the cucumbers and thoroughly mix in all ingredients.

  2. Pour the mixture over the cucumbers.

  3. Put into stone jars and cover with a plate.

  4. Let stand for some time before using.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 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, watery texture.
Mustard seed
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that carries through the pickle.
Celery seed
Contributes a warm, savoury aroma characteristic of pickles.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the other flavourings.
Horseradish
Provides a sharp, pungent heat that gives the pickle its bite.
Black pepper
Adds mild, lingering heat and a spicy note.

The step that matters

Salting the cucumbers overnight. Soaking cucumbers in salted water draws out excess moisture and firms their cell walls, so they stay crisp rather than turning soft during pickling.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

More cucumber pickles recipes

Sweet 23Green 9Spiced 9Small 7Sliced 6Sour 5 See all 334 →

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