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Vegetable Marrow Pickle

A pickle made from vegetable marrow, ginger, cloves, mustard, onions, brown vinegar, sugar, and chillies.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Vegetable Marrow Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the marrow

  1. Peel the marrow and scrape out the seeds.

  2. Cut it into 1-inch cubes and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  3. Leave overnight and then drain in a cloth.

Make the pickle

  1. In a pot, combine the ginger, cloves, mustard, chopped onions, brown vinegar, and lump sugar.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes, stirring well.

  3. Add the drained marrow and boil all together for 20 minutes, stirring frequently.

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. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  3. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Clove + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,829 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Ginger + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,595 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

Vegetable marrow
Forms the bulk of the pickle and becomes tender as it simmers in the syrup.
Brown vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that gives the pickle its tang and helps keep it stable.
Lump sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness and helps form a thick syrup.
Ginger
Contributes warm, spicy aroma and flavour to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Salting and draining the marrow overnight. Salt draws water out of the marrow's cells through osmosis. Draining well removes that liquid so the pickle stays firm and the syrup is not diluted.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ginger, clove, mustard, vinegar, sugar):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Radishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, clove, mustard, vinegar, sugar. 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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