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Indian Pickle

A vinegar-based pickle with garlic, ginger, mustard seed, cayenne pepper, and assorted vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Indian Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the brine

  1. Mix vinegar, garlic, salt, ginger, mustard seed, and cayenne pepper in a large bowl.

Salt the vegetables

  1. Soak the vegetables in salt for three days.

Pack and rest

  1. Place the salted vegetables into a pickle bottle.

  2. Cork the bottle and let it sit for three weeks before using.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Mustard + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together687 recipes

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

  3. Cauliflower + beanstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

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

  4. Mustard + beanstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

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

  5. Garlic + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Vinegar
Provides the acidic liquid that preserves the vegetables and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Salt
Draws water out of the vegetables and helps keep them crisp and preserved.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma and flavour that mellows during the long resting period.
Ginger
Adds warm, aromatic flavour to the brine.
White mustard seed
Adds sharp, pungent flavour and aroma to the pickling liquid.
Cayenne pepper
Adds heat to the pickle.

The step that matters

Salting the vegetables for three days. Salt draws water out of the vegetables through osmosis. Too little salt or too short a time leaves them soft and wet, so the pickle may spoil or lose its crispness.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, garlic, mustard, pepper, onion, cauliflower, beans. 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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