Skip to main content
Main

Mustard Pickles

A pickled vegetable mixture flavored with mustard, sugar, turmeric, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Mustard Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Soak cucumbers and tomatoes overnight in hot brine.

  2. Cook onions, beans, and cauliflower for 10 minutes.

  3. Pour dressing made from mustard, sugar, turmeric, and vinegar over the cooked vegetables.

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. Cauliflower + turmerictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together514 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cauliflower + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together687 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Mustard + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,279 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

Vinegar
Provides acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps preserve the vegetables.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar and mustard.
Colman's mustard
Contributes the pungent, sharp flavor that defines the pickle.
Turmeric
Gives the pickle its yellow color and an earthy, aromatic flavor.
Cucumbers
Provide crisp texture, which brining helps keep firm.

The step that matters

Cooking the onions, beans, and cauliflower. Cooking for too long softens the vegetables and they lose their crisp texture. Their structure relies on brief heat, so timing matters before the dressing is added.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, beans, cauliflower, pepper, mustard, sugar, turmeric):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Broccolifits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, beans, cauliflower, pepper, mustard, sugar, turmeric. 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 mustard pickles recipes

Mixed 7 See all 151 →

You might also like

Cauliflower SoupCauliflower Soup28 recipesCream of Cauliflower SoupCream of Cauliflower Soup22 recipesCreamed CauliflowerCreamed Cauliflower17 recipesEscalloped CauliflowerEscalloped Cauliflower9 recipes