Name: Picbxed Onions
Ingredients: small onions; white wine vinegar; coarse sea salt; ginger; whole black pepper; mustard seed; garlic; cloves

Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Picbxed Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Peel the small onions.
Boil 2 quarts of white wine vinegar with ½ pound of bruised ginger, 2 ounces of whole black pepper, and ½ pound of mustard seed.

Pickle

When the onions look clear (after 3-4 minutes), place them in jars.
Pour the hot vinegar mixture over the onions.
Cover the jars and let them sit until the next day.

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.

Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,038 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together29,058 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together17,451 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Mustard + garlictop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together4,053 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Small onions: Form the main body of the pickle and soften slightly while they steep in the hot liquid.
White wine vinegar: Provides the sharp acidity that preserves and flavours the onions.
Ginger: Adds a warm, aromatic note to the pickling liquid.
Mustard seed: Releases a pungent, sharp aroma into the vinegar as it steeps.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, white wine, vinegar, pepper, mustard, garlic, clove):

Thymefits better
Tarragonfits better
Allspicefits better
Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, white wine, vinegar, pepper, mustard, garlic, clove. 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.