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A pickled vegetable mixture of cucumbers, onions, cauliflower, and green peppers in a mustard, turmeric, sugar, and flour paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and cauliflower 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. Cut the cucumbers, onions, cauliflowers, and green peppers.

  2. Soak the cut vegetables in salt and water for 4 hours.

  3. Scald and drain the vegetables.

Make the mustard paste

  1. In a bowl, mix the mustard, turmeric, sugar, and flour together.

  2. Add enough cold vinegar to create a paste.

Combine and pack

  1. Pour the paste into 2 quarts of boiling vinegar.

  2. Mix the paste thoroughly with the pickles.

  3. Pack the mixture into cans.

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. Cucumber + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together584 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, firm pickled vegetable base of the relish.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavor that balances the sweetness and vinegar.
Flour
Thickens the mustard paste so it coats the vegetables rather than separating.
Sugar
Balances the acidity of the vinegar with sweetness.
Vinegar
Acidifies the brine, preserving the vegetables and giving the pickle its tang.
Turmeric
Gives the pickle its yellow color and a mild, earthy aroma.

The step that matters

Adding the cold vinegar to make the paste. Flour and mustard must be blended smoothly with cold vinegar before being added to the hot vinegar. Adding dry mix directly to boiling liquid causes lumps, because flour clumps when it hits heat without first being dispersed in liquid.

Swap the onion

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

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

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