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Pickled Onions

A pickled onion recipe using white onions, salt, water, spiced vinegar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pickled Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Peel the small white onions.

  2. Boil salt and water in a pan.

  3. Add a few onions at a time to the boiling water until they look clear.

  4. Remove the onions and place them on a sieve to dry.

  5. Once cooled, place the onions in jars.

Pickle

  1. In a pot, combine spiced vinegar with allspice, peppercorns, mace, cloves, and mustard seeds.

  2. Boil the mixture and pour it hot over the onions 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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Allspice + macetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 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

Spiced vinegar
Provides the sharp acidity that preserves the onions and gives the pickle its tang.
Small white onions
Form the pickle itself, softening slightly while keeping a crisp, mild bite.
Mustard seeds
Add a pungent, slightly bitter aroma that flavours the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Blanching the onions until they look clear. Brief boiling in salted water softens the onions enough to absorb the vinegar brine, but over-boiling makes them mushy. Drying them well before jarring keeps excess water from diluting the vinegar.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, vinegar, allspice, clove, 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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