Skip to main content
Main

Indian Pickles

A mixture of cabbage, cauliflower, and assorted vegetables pickled with salt, spices, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Indian Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Remove the outer leaves from the cabbage and slice the rest thinly. Break the cauliflower into small pieces.

  2. Sprinkle coarse sea salt thickly over the vegetables and let them stand for 2 days, stirring well.

  3. Let the vegetables drain and place them in a large jar.

Pack the jar

  1. Add French beans, gherkins, small onions, capsicums, nasturtium leaves, garlic, eschalots, horseradish, powdered ginger, peppercorns, and long peppers.

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 + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Cauliflower + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together139 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cabbage + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together305 recipes

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

  4. Cabbage + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together481 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Cauliflower + beanstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

White cabbage
Forms the bulk of the pickle and, once salted, softens and becomes crisp-tender.
Cauliflower
Adds bulk and texture, softening as it draws out moisture under salt.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the vegetables and preserves them while they stand.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma and flavour that mellows during pickling.
Powdered ginger
Contributes warm, aromatic heat to the pickle.

The step that matters

Salting and standing for 2 days. Salt must be spread thickly and stirred well so it reaches all the vegetables. Uneven salting lets some pieces spoil, while draining afterwards removes the excess liquid the salt has pulled out.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, cauliflower, beans, onion, capsicum, garlic, horseradish):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, cauliflower, beans, onion, capsicum, garlic, horseradish. 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.

More indian pickles recipes

East 15 See all 15 →

You might also like

Red CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipesStewed CabbageStewed Cabbage58 recipesBaked CabbageBaked Cabbage51 recipesCauliflower SoupCauliflower Soup28 recipes