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French Pickles

A pickled vegetable mixture of tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, peppers, mustard, sugar, celery seed, and vinegar, salted and boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

French Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the vegetables and grind them using a meat grinder.

  2. Sprinkle the ground vegetables thickly with coarse sea salt and let them stand overnight.

  3. Drain the vegetables for several hours.

Cook and bottle

  1. Combine all ingredients in a pot and bring to a brisk boil.

  2. Bottle the mixture and seal it.

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. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + cucumbertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,405 recipes

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

  4. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the bulk and moisture that make up most of the pickle.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the pickle its tang and helps preserve it.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Mustard
Adds pungent flavor that gives the pickle its characteristic bite.
Celery seed
Adds a savory, aromatic flavor to the pickle.

The step that matters

Salting and draining the ground vegetables. Salt draws water out of the vegetables through osmosis. Draining after the overnight rest removes that liquid, so the finished pickle is thicker and less watery rather than diluted.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, cucumber, vinegar, pepper, mustard, sugar, celery):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, cucumber, vinegar, pepper, mustard, sugar, celery. 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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