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Pickle Lilly

Pickled green tomatoes and peppers in a sweet and spicy vinegar brine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pickle Lilly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Sprinkle tomatoes and peppers with salt and let stand overnight.

  2. Drain off the brine and cover with vinegar.

  3. Cook slowly for 1 hour.

  4. Drain again and place in a jar.

Make the syrup and seal

  1. In a pot, combine sugar, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, mustard, horseradish, and vinegar. Bring to a boil and pour over the pickles in the jar.

  2. Seal the jar tightly.

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 + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Form the bulk of the pickle and soften as they cook in the vinegar.
Sea salt
Draws water out of the vegetables overnight, firming them and seasoning the pickle.
Vinegar
Provides the sour acidity that preserves and flavors the pickle.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.
Green peppers
Add grassy flavor and some crunch to the mixed pickle.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that mellows during pickling.

The step that matters

Draining off the brine before adding vinegar. The salt draws out a great deal of water overnight, and the vegetables must be drained well so the vinegar is not diluted and the pickle stays firm rather than watery.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, sugar, cinnamon, clove, allspice, mustard, horseradish):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, sugar, cinnamon, clove, allspice, mustard, horseradish. 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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