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Cauliflower Pickled

Cauliflower Pickled is a preserved cauliflower dish made by boiling and vinegar pickling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Cauliflower and vinegar work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 888 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cauliflower Pickled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cauliflower

  1. Pick and wash the cauliflower florets, cut off 3 pounds of the flowered buds, and arrange them in small equal-sized bunches.

  2. Soak the bunches in a pan of cold water.

  3. Bring lightly salted water to a boil in a saucepan and add the cauliflower.

  4. Boil for 6 minutes, then drain and place in an earthen jar.

Pickle and store

  1. Pour hot boiling vinegar over the cauliflower and cover the jar until the next day.

  2. The next day, drain off the vinegar, boil it again with a little salt, and pour it hot over the cauliflower in the jar.

  3. Once cooled, cover tightly and store in a cool place.

  4. If using glass jars, pour the vinegar in slowly to prevent cracking.

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 + vinegartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together888 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Cauliflower florets
Forms the crisp, firm body of the pickle that holds its texture in the brine.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the flavour of the pickled cauliflower.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot vinegar into glass jars. Pouring hot vinegar slowly helps prevent thermal shock, which can crack glass. Pouring it quickly over cold glass creates a sudden temperature difference that can break the jar.

“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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