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Mustard Pickles

A pickled vegetable mix flavored with mustard, vinegar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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. Combine the salt and water to make a brine.

  2. Add the vegetables to the brine and let them stand for 24 hours.

  3. Drain the vegetables and set aside.

Make the dressing and serve

  1. In a pot, combine vinegar, mustard, brown sugar, flour, curry powder, and celery seed. Boil the mixture for 5 minutes.

  2. Pour the dressing over the pickles; it should be thick like cream.

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 + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together687 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Beans + cauliflowertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  5. Beans + mustardtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 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

Cauliflower
Forms the bulk of the pickle and absorbs the brine and dressing flavours.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the vegetables and gives the pickle its tang.
Flour
Thickens the dressing so it clings to the vegetables instead of running off.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar and mustard.
Mustard
Supplies the sharp, pungent flavour that defines the pickle.

The step that matters

Boil the dressing for 5 minutes. Flour thickens only when heated enough to gelatinise its starch. Boiling for the full time cooks out the raw flour taste and gives the thick, creamy consistency the dressing needs to coat the vegetables.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, beans, cucumber, cauliflower, vinegar, mustard, 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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