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Mustard Pickles

A pickled cucumber dish flavored with mustard, onions, sugar, vinegar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,259 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Mustard Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scald the onions.

Make the pickles

  1. Mix pickles, onions, mustard, sugar, and enough vinegar to cover pickles.

  2. Heat the mixture slowly on the back of the stove for 1 hour.

  3. Add the tied mixed spices.

  4. Seal while hot.

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

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

  2. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Mustard + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,424 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

Pickles
Form the bulk of the dish and supply the main pickled texture.
Mixed mustard
Provides the sharp, pungent flavour that defines the pickle.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves the pickles and sharpens the overall flavour.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar and mustard with sweetness.

The step that matters

Heating slowly on the back of the stove. Gentle, prolonged heat softens the onions and pickles and lets the vinegar and spices blend without boiling the vegetables to mush or scorching the sugar.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mustard, sugar, 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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