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Salad

Chow Chow

A pickled relish of cauliflower, cucumbers, onions, and spices in a vinegar and sugar brine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Chow Chow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Soak the cucumbers in brine for 2 to 3 days.

  2. Scald the cauliflower, small cucumbers, and onions in strong salt water.

Make the sauce

  1. Add pepper, whole cloves, allspice, and stick cinnamon as desired.

  2. In a pot, scald the vinegar, brown sugar, flour, and ground mustard while stirring constantly until well mixed.

  3. Pour the mixture over the pickles.

Bottle

  1. Bottle in wide-mouthed bottles or glass jars and seal.

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 + 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 acidity that preserves the relish and gives it its sharp, tangy flavour.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Flour
Thickens the hot vinegar mixture so it clings to the vegetables.
Ground mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour to the sauce.
Cauliflower
Forms the firm, crisp bulk of the relish that holds its texture after pickling.

The step that matters

Scald the vinegar mixture while stirring constantly. Flour settles and clumps quickly when heated without constant stirring, leaving lumps and an uneven, pasty sauce instead of a smooth, thickened one.

Swap the onion

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

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

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