Name: Round Plum Pickle
Ingredients: perfectly ripe plums; coarse sea salt; cloves of garlic; fresh green or red chillies; sliced ginger; peppercorns; ground mustard seed; vinegar

Why it works: Clove and ginger 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 ↓

Round Plum Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Wash the plums and roll them in a damp cloth to remove dust.
Sprinkle the plums with coarse sea salt and place them in the sun for 3 to 4 days.
Drain the plums and layer them in bottles with garlic, chillies, ginger, peppercorns, and mustard seed.
Add a little more salt and fill the bottles with vinegar.
Cork the bottles and expose them to the sun for nearly a month.

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.

Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,038 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Garlic + mustardtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together4,053 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
Garlic + gingertop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,402 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14,067 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Plum + clovetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together446 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

Swap the plum

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

Limefits better
Avocadofits about as well
Cherryfits about as well
Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, garlic, ginger, mustard, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.