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To Make Indian-Pickle, or Picalillo

A pickled vegetable mixture of cabbage, cauliflower, cucumbers, radish pods, kidney beans, beetroot, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and radish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 212 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

To Make Indian-Pickle, or Picalillo

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop the cabbage, cauliflower, cucumbers, radish pods, kidney beans, and beetroot.

  2. Place them in a sieve and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  3. Set them in the sunshine or near the fire for three days to dry.

  4. Layer the dried vegetables in a large earthen pot, adding a handful of brown mustard seed between layers.

Pickle and steep

  1. Cover the vegetables with ale vinegar, adding 1 ounce of turmeric for every 4 quarts of vinegar.

  2. Boil the vinegar mixture and pour it hot over the pickles.

  3. Let the pickles sit for twelve days on the hearth until they turn bright yellow and most of the vinegar is absorbed.

Add the spiced vinegar

  1. In a separate pot, boil 2 quarts of strong ale vinegar with mace, white pepper, cloves, long pepper, and nutmeg for ten minutes.

  2. Pour this mixture over the pickles.

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 + radishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together212 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Cauliflower + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together584 recipes

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

  3. Radish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together297 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Cauliflower + radishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together55 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Cucumber + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together345 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

White cabbage
Forms the crisp, bulky body of the pickle that holds up to long steeping.
Cauliflower
Adds firm texture that absorbs the vinegar and spices well.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the vegetables so they dry and stay crisp in the vinegar.
Ale vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the vegetables and sharpens the flavour.
Turmeric
Colours the pickle bright yellow and adds a warm, earthy flavour.
Cloves
Adds a pungent, aromatic warmth to the spiced vinegar.

The step that matters

Drying the vegetables after salting. Salting and drying for three days removes water from the vegetables. If they stay wet, they dilute the vinegar and soften, so the pickle loses crispness and keeps less well.

Swap the kidney beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, cauliflower, cucumber, radish, beetroot, mustard, vinegar):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Sesamefits better
  4. Kidney beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, cauliflower, cucumber, radish, beetroot, mustard, 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.

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