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Dessert

Melon Pickle

A preserved musk melon filled with onions, cucumbers, raisins, and spices, then soaked in vinegar and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and cauliflower match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 584 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Melon Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the melons

  1. Pare the musk melons, cut off the top, and remove the seeds.

  2. Cover the melons with brine for three days.

Fill and pickle

  1. Fill the melons with small onions, cucumbers, raisins, nasturtium seeds, beans, cauliflower (cooked tender), and pieces of large green pepper.

  2. Add a stick of cinnamon and white mustard seed.

  3. Tie the tops on with strips of muslin.

  4. Cover the filled melons with vinegar mixed with brown sugar and turmeric.

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 + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together584 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Beans + cauliflowertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Cucumber + beanstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together602 recipes

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

  5. Beans + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together511 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

Musk melons
Serve as the hollow vessel that holds the filling while it pickles.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Acidity preserves the filling and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
White mustard seed
Adds a sharp, pungent flavour to the pickling liquid.
Turmeric
Gives the pickle its yellow colour and an earthy aroma.

The step that matters

Cover the melons with brine for three days. Brining draws water out of the melon and seasons it through. Too short a soak leaves the flesh bland and watery, and too long can make it overly salty and soft.

Swap the musk melon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, cucumber, raisin, beans, cauliflower, pepper, cinnamon):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Musk melonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, cucumber, raisin, beans, cauliflower, pepper, cinnamon. 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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