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Mustard Pickles

Pickled cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, cauliflower, and green peppers in a mustard and turmeric vinegar brine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Soak the cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, cauliflower, and green peppers in brine for 24 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mix together the mustard, turmeric, sugar, and flour.

  2. Stir the mixture into 1 gallon of boiling vinegar.

  3. Add the soaked vegetables to the vinegar mixture and cook slightly.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavor that defines the pickle.
Flour
Thickens the vinegar mixture so it clings to the vegetables.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.
Cucumbers
Provide the main crisp, pickled vegetable texture.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into boiling vinegar. Flour mixed into hot liquid can clump; blending it smoothly into a dry paste first, then stirring steadily into the vinegar, helps the sauce thicken evenly.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, tomato, cauliflower, pepper, mustard, turmeric, 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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