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Mustakd Pickles

Pickled onions flavored with sugar, flour, ground mustard, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Mustakd Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Slice the onions.

  2. Salt the onions.

  3. Let the onions stand overnight.

  4. Drain the onions.

  5. Pour scalding vinegar over the onions.

  6. Let the onions stand for three days.

Make the mustard sauce and pickles

  1. Mix the sugar, flour, and ground mustard with enough cold vinegar to make a paste.

  2. Stir the paste into one quart of boiling vinegar.

  3. Let the mixture boil for about three minutes.

  4. Pour the mixture over the pickles and mix well.

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. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Make up the bulk of the pickle and give it its crisp, firm texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Flour
Thickens the mustard mixture into a smooth, cohesive sauce as it heats.
Ground mustard
Supplies the main pungent mustard flavor and sharp aroma.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps preserve the pickles.

The step that matters

Mix the paste with cold vinegar first. Flour clumps if it hits hot liquid dry. Blending it into a smooth paste with cold vinegar lets the starch disperse evenly, so when the mixture is stirred into boiling vinegar it thickens into a smooth sauce rather than lumps.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, mustard, 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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