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French Pickles

Pickled green tomatoes and onions seasoned with 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 ↓

French Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Sprinkle salt over sliced tomatoes and onions.

  2. Let sit overnight.

  3. In the morning, drain off the water.

Cook and pickle

  1. Boil tomatoes and onions in 2 quarts of water and 1 quart of vinegar for 15 minutes.

  2. Drain in a colander.

  3. In a pot, combine 4 quarts of vinegar, brown sugar, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, ground mustard, and red pepper.

  4. Pour the mixture over the drained tomatoes and onions and cook for 15 minutes.

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. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  5. Cinnamon + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Form the bulk of the pickle and soften as they simmer in the spiced vinegar.
Onions
Add savoury body and sweetness that mellows as they cook in the vinegar.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the tomatoes and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Brown sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness and adds depth of flavour.

The step that matters

Drain the tomatoes and onions before adding the spiced vinegar. Salting draws water out of the vegetables, and the water left behind would dilute the vinegar mixture. Draining well keeps the pickling liquid strong and the texture firm.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Radishfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, vinegar, sugar, clove, cinnamon, ginger, mustard. 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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