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Mustard Pickle

A pickled vegetable mixture of peppers, onions, cauliflower, cucumbers, tomatoes, seasoned with mustard, turmeric, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and cucumber 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 Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Finely chop the red peppers and remove some seeds.

  2. Halve the onions after peeling.

  3. Chop the cauliflowers and tomatoes, and cut the cucumbers in half lengthwise.

  4. Cover all vegetables with salt and let them stand overnight.

  5. Drain thoroughly, add cold water, and heat through without boiling.

Make the pickle sauce

  1. Heat 1½ quarts of vinegar.

  2. Make a paste with the flour, mustard, and turmeric blended smooth with the remaining pint of vinegar.

  3. Add sugar to the hot vinegar, then thicken with the paste and cook well.

Combine and store

  1. Drain the vegetables and mix thoroughly in the vinegar.

  2. Store in bottles or a stone jar.

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. Cauliflower + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together584 recipes

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

  2. Cauliflower + turmerictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together514 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Mustard + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,279 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Mustard + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 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

Flour
Thickens the vinegar sauce into a smooth, thick mustard coating.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavour and helps thicken the sauce when blended with flour.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.
Vinegar
Acidic base that preserves the vegetables and carries the sauce flavour.
Cauliflowers
Firm vegetable that holds its texture and absorbs the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with the paste and cook well. Flour mixed into a paste before adding it to hot liquid prevents lumps. The sauce must cook long enough for the starch to fully thicken and lose its raw flour taste.

Swap the onion

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

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

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