Skip to main content
Snack

Sliced Cucumber Pickles

Sliced cucumber pickles are cucumbers and onions pickled in salt, spices, and cold vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cucumber and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,050 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sliced Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the cucumbers and slice them.

  2. Sprinkle salt over the cucumbers as you place them in jars.

  3. Add sliced onions and sprinkle with salt in separate jars.

Salt and drain

  1. Let them stand for 6 to 8 hours.

  2. Drain through a colander and return to jars, mixing onions with cucumbers.

Pack and cover

  1. Sprinkle spices between the layers.

  2. Pour enough cold vinegar over to cover the cucumbers and onions.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  3. Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the main crisp vegetable body that the brine and vinegar flavour.
Small white onions
Add sharp, savoury flavour that mellows during salting and pickling.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and onions, leaving them firmer and less watery.
Cold vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the vegetables and gives the pickles their tang.

The step that matters

Salting and draining. Salt draws water out of the cucumbers and onions through osmosis. Standing for the full 6 to 8 hours and draining well leaves the pickles crisp rather than soggy, and keeps the vinegar from being diluted.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Radishfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Cauliflowerfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, 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.

More cucumber pickles recipes

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

You might also like

FrittersFritters56 recipesCrisp CrackersCrisp Crackers7 recipes