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Mixed Mustard Pickles

Pickles of onions, cucumbers, cauliflower, celery, and red peppers in a mustard‑flavored vinegar mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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 ↓

Mixed Mustard Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Cover onions, cucumbers, and cauliflower with strong brine and let sit overnight.

  2. In the morning, pour off the brine and drain the pickles well.

Make the dressing

  1. In a preserving kettle, combine vinegar and chopped celery; cook until tender.

  2. Add chopped red peppers to the kettle.

  3. In a bowl, mix brown sugar, mustard, flour, salt, butter, turmeric, egg, and cold vinegar.

  4. Stir the mixture into the hot vinegar and cook.

Pack and bottle

  1. Pour the boiling mixture over the vegetables and bottle.

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

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

  5. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 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

Flour
Thickens the sweet-sour mixture into a smooth, spoonable sauce.
Egg
Adds richness and helps thicken the dressing as it cooks.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavor that balances the sweetness of the sugar.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the vinegar and softens the sharpness of the pickling liquid.
Vinegar
Acidifies the mixture, preserving the vegetables and giving them tang.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture into the hot vinegar and cook. Flour and egg thicken only when heated, but they can clump or scramble if added to cold liquid or boiled too hard. Stir constantly while cooking so the dressing turns smooth and even.

Swap the onion

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

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

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