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Pickled Cucumber

Pickled cucumbers with chilies, onion, garlic, peppercorns, curry powder, vinegar, and coconut oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Pickled Cucumber

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Do not peel the cucumbers; halve and quarter them, then remove the seeds.

  2. Sprinkle the cucumbers with salt and spread them on a large dish in the sun for 3 hours, then drain.

Make the pickle

  1. In an enamel basin, add the halved chilies.

  2. Finely chop the onion and garlic using a mortar and pestle.

  3. Add the chopped onion, garlic, and peppercorns to the basin.

  4. Stir in the curry powder and enough boiled vinegar to cover the mixture.

  5. Simmer gently for 30 minutes, then add the coconut oil.

Bottle and rest

  1. Transfer the mixture to a bottle and seal it.

  2. Let it sit for a week 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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Cucumber + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,556 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

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

  4. Cucumber + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  5. Cucumber + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,319 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, bulky vegetable that forms the body of the pickle.
Vinegar
Acidity preserves the pickle and gives it its sharp, tangy flavour.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma and flavour that defines the pickle.
Chillies
Add heat and pungency to the pickling liquid.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and body to the pickling mixture.

The step that matters

Sun-salting the cucumbers. Salting draws out water through osmosis, so the cucumbers lose moisture and stay firmer rather than turning soft in the vinegar. Draining well before adding the vinegar keeps the pickle crisp and stops excess liquid from diluting the brine.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Coconutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, onion, clove, garlic, 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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