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Mixed Mustard Pickle

A pickled mixture of cucumbers, onions, cauliflower, and green peppers flavored with mustard, vinegar, sugar, flour, and turmeric.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Mixed Mustard Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Soak cucumbers, onions, cauliflower, and green peppers in salt and water.

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, make a paste with flour and mustard.

  2. Mix the paste with vinegar and turmeric.

Cook

  1. Boil all ingredients together.

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

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

  4. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  5. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 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

Vinegar
Provides the sharp acidity that gives pickles their tang and helps preserve them.
Mustard
Adds the pungent, sharp flavor that defines mustard pickles.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, sauce-like coating around the vegetables.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Turmeric
Gives the pickles their characteristic yellow color and mild earthy flavor.

The step that matters

Mix the paste with vinegar and turmeric. Flour must be blended smoothly into the mustard paste and liquid before heating, because starch lumps form if it is not dispersed, and those lumps do not fully thicken the sauce.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, cauliflower, pepper, vinegar, mustard, sugar, flour. 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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