Name: Pickle Powders
Ingredients: 6 ounces dried pickled mangoes; 3 ounces mushroom powder; ½ teaspoon mace; ½ teaspoon cloves; ½ teaspoon nutmeg; ½ teaspoon cayenne; 1 teaspoon black pepper

Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pickle Powders

Ingredients

Directions

Make the powder

Dry pickled mangoes in slices and reduce them to powder.
Mix the mango powder with mushroom powder and spices.
Pound the mixture very fine and sift through a fine sieve.

Store

Store in small bottles or tin boxes lined with paper.

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.

Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,686 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,557 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together17,451 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Mango + peppertop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together471 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,400 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Dried pickled mangoes: Provides the sour, tangy flavour that defines the powder.
Mushroom powder: Adds savoury depth and bulk to the blend.
Black pepper: Contributes sharp, aromatic heat to the spice blend.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mango, mushroom, clove, nutmeg, pepper):

Cinnamonfits better
Allspicefits better
Cardamomfits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mango, mushroom, clove, nutmeg, pepper. 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.