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Mixed Pickles

A pickled assortment of cucumbers, wax beans, onions, cauliflower, kohlrabi, carrots, root celery, and red pepper in a vinegar‑sugar‑mustard‑curry dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Mixed Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Soak the cucumbers in salt water for 24 hours.

  2. Boil the other vegetables in separate vessels of salt water until tender but not soft.

Make the dressing

  1. In a pot, combine diluted vinegar, white sugar, mustard, curry powder, and flour.

  2. Boil the dressing until it thickens to the consistency of cream.

Pack and seal

  1. Pack the vegetables into glass jars, adding a strip of red pepper to each jar.

  2. Pour the hot dressing over the packed vegetables and seal 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. Cucumber + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together584 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  4. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Kohlrabi + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together35 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

Flour
Thickens the dressing so it clings to the vegetables.
White sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharp vinegar.
Diluted vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and flavors the pickles.
Cucumbers
Main vegetable that becomes crisp-tender and absorbs the dressing's flavor.

The step that matters

Boil the dressing until it thickens. Flour only thickens fully when it is cooked long enough with the liquid; stopping early leaves a thin dressing with a raw flour taste and poor cling to the vegetables.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, beans, cauliflower, kohlrabi, carrot, celery, vinegar):

  1. Broccolifits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, beans, cauliflower, kohlrabi, carrot, celery, 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 mixed pickles recipes

English 3 See all 133 →

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