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Sweet Cauliflower Pickles

A pickled cauliflower dish flavored with vinegar, brown sugar, mustard, ginger, turmeric, garlic, and green peppers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Sweet Cauliflower Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pickling liquid

  1. Beat together the eggs, brown sugar, French mustard, ginger, and turmeric until well combined.

  2. Boil the mixture in vinegar with garlic and green peppers for 10 minutes.

Cook the cauliflower and pack

  1. Boil the cauliflower in salted water until tender.

  2. Carefully place the cauliflower in a jar and pour the hot mixture over it.

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. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Mustard + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Cauliflower + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together124 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Ginger + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Cauliflower
Is the vegetable being pickled, giving the crisp-tender bite once cooked.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickling liquid.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the sharpness of the vinegar.
Eggs
Thicken the mixture as they cook, giving the liquid a custard-like body.
French mustard
Adds sharp, tangy flavour that complements the sweet and sour balance.

The step that matters

Beating the eggs into the mixture before heating. Eggs thicken when heated but can scramble if they meet hot liquid too fast. Beating them smooth with the sugar and other ingredients first helps them combine evenly into the sauce.

Swap the garlic

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cauliflower, vinegar, sugar, egg, mustard, ginger, clove. 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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