Name: Radish Pods, to Pickle
Ingredients: radish pods; salt; cold vinegar

Why it works: Radish and vinegar work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 508 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Radish Pods, to Pickle

Ingredients

radish pods
salt
cold vinegar

Directions

Prepare

Gather the pods when the seeds are fully grown but soft.
Wash them in salted water.

Pickle

Put them into glass bottles or unglazed jars.
Pour cold vinegar over the pods.
As the vinegar is absorbed, add more until the jars are full.
Tie down the jars closely and store in a dry place.

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.

Radish + vinegartop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together508 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Radish pods: Are the main ingredient, providing the crisp, pickled body of the dish.
Cold vinegar: Acidifies and preserves the pods, giving them their sharp, tangy flavour.

“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.