Name: Mustard Pickles
Ingredients: 1 cup vinegar (cider, wine, or malt); 1 tablespoon mustard; spices to taste

Why it works: Vinegar and mustard are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,067 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Mustard Pickles

Ingredients

1 cup vinegar (cider, wine, or malt)
1 tablespoon mustard
spices to taste

Directions

Make the mustard paste

Mix vinegar, mustard, and spices in a bowl to form a thin paste.

Combine and jar

Soak soft vegetables like young podded beans and beets in water.
Add the soaked vegetables to the mustard mixture and stir well.
Transfer to jars and seal for preservation.

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.

Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14,067 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Vinegar: Provides the acidity that preserves the pickles and sharpens their flavour.
Mustard: Adds pungent flavour and helps thicken the vinegar into a paste that coats the vegetables.

“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.