Skip to main content
Soup

Sour Pickle

A pickled vegetable mixture of green tomatoes, radishes, onions, and green peppers seasoned with salt, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Radish and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 297 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Sour Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop the vegetables finely.

  2. Mix the chopped vegetables in an earthenware dish with the salt.

  3. Place a weight on top of the dish.

  4. Let the mixture stand for 24 hours.

  5. Drain the mixture through a colander.

  6. Transfer the drained mixture to crocks.

Add spices and vinegar

  1. Tie the spices in muslin bags, one for each crock.

  2. Heat the vinegar.

  3. Pour the heated vinegar over the vegetables, leaving room for expansion.

  4. Sprinkle mustard and celery seed in the crocks; omit if not preferred.

  5. Ensure the pickles are always covered with vinegar to preserve them.

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. Radish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together297 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

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

  5. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 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

Green tomatoes
Form the bulk of the pickle and soften as they cure in salt.
Onions
Add sharp, savoury flavour and body to the chopped vegetable mix.
Green peppers
Contribute crisp texture and a fresh, slightly bitter note.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the vegetables, firming them and concentrating flavour before pickling.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that preserves the pickles and gives them their sour taste.

The step that matters

Keep the pickles covered with vinegar. Vegetables exposed to air can spoil or mould. Keeping them submerged in vinegar maintains the acidity that preserves them.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (radish, onion, pepper, mustard, celery, vinegar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against radish, onion, pepper, mustard, 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 sour pickles recipes

Green 3 See all 9 →

You might also like

Cream of CeleryCream of Celery37 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque11 recipesIndian Spiced Potato Soup with Tofu and SpinachIndian Spiced Potato Soup with Tofu and Spinach448 recipesClear Carrot and Bottle Gourd SoupClear Carrot and Bottle Gourd Soup65 recipes