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Indian Pickle

A fermented pickle of cauliflower, cabbage, carrots, onions, and turnips in a vinegar and spice brine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 286 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Indian Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Combine cauliflower, white cabbage, carrots, onions, and turnips in a bowl.

  2. Boil a strong brine with coarse sea salt, then simmer the vegetables in the brine for 2 minutes.

  3. Drain the vegetables and let them dry in a warm place until shriveled.

Make the pickling liquid

  1. In a pot, combine vinegar, mustard flour, long pepper, ginger, horseradish, and shallots.

  2. Boil the mixture.

Pickle and store

  1. Pour the hot mixture over the pickles.

  2. Once cooled, seal the jar and add more vinegar if needed.

  3. Let the pickles sit for a month before enjoying.

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. Cauliflower + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cauliflower + cabbagetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  5. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Mustard flour
Adds sharp pungent heat that gives the pickling liquid its characteristic bite.
Horseradish
Contributes sharp, pungent heat that mellows during the pickling rest.
Vinegar
Acidity preserves the vegetables and gives the pickle its tang.
Cauliflower
Forms the firm, crisp bulk of the pickle that holds up to the brine.

The step that matters

Drying the vegetables until shriveled. Removing surface moisture before the hot vinegar is added helps the vegetables stay crisp and keeps the liquid from being diluted, so the pickle keeps its texture and tang.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cauliflower, cabbage, carrot, turnip, vinegar, mustard, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cauliflower, cabbage, carrot, turnip, vinegar, mustard, 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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