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Choavchow with Mustard

A vegetable stew of onions, cauliflower, celery, bell peppers, and mustard simmered in vinegar and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and turmeric match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 514 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Choavchow with Mustard

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Prepare each vegetable in separate vessels and bring to a boil, but do not overcook.

  2. Drain the vegetables once cooked.

Make the mustard sauce

  1. Mix mustard with water until it forms a paste.

  2. Combine the mustard paste with 2 quarts of vinegar and bring to a boil.

  3. Add celery seed to the boiling vinegar and enough flour to thicken it to gravy consistency.

Combine and cook

  1. Stir in all the vegetables and cook for a short time.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Celery + turmerictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Mustard
Provides the sharp, pungent flavor that defines the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the stew its tangy, sharp taste.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar and mustard.
Turmeric
Gives the sauce its yellow colour and a mild, earthy aroma.
Celery seed
Adds a warm, aromatic celery flavour to the vinegar sauce.
Cauliflower
Forms the main vegetable body and holds its shape when briefly cooked.

The step that matters

Cook the vegetables only until just done. The vegetables cook again when stirred into the hot sauce. Overcooking them first makes them soft and mushy, and they lose their texture in the final stew.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cauliflower, celery, pepper, sugar, mustard, turmeric, vinegar. 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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