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Indian Pickle, or Piccalillo

A fermented vegetable pickle made with cabbage, cauliflower, cucumbers, onions, beans, radish, beetroot, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and radish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 212 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Indian Pickle, or Piccalillo

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop the cabbage, cauliflower, cucumbers, onions, kidney beans, radish pods, and beetroot.

  2. Place the chopped vegetables in a sieve and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  3. Let the vegetables dry in a warm place for 3 days.

Layer and pickle

  1. Layer the dried vegetables in a large earthenware pan, adding a handful of mustard seeds between each layer.

  2. In a pot, combine vinegar and turmeric. Boil the mixture and pour it hot over the layered vegetables.

  3. Let the mixture sit in a warm place for 2 weeks until the pickles turn bright yellow and most vinegar is absorbed.

Add the spiced vinegar

  1. In a separate pot, boil 2 quarts of vinegar with mace, white pepper, cloves, and nutmeg for 10 minutes.

  2. Pour this mixture over the pickles along with the peeled garlic and chalots. Seal the container tightly.

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 + radishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together212 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Cauliflower + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together584 recipes

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

  3. Radish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together297 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Cauliflower + radishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together55 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Cucumber + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together345 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the pickle and holds its crisp texture through salting and pickling.
Cauliflower
Adds firm bulk that soaks up the spiced vinegar and turmeric colour.
Mustard seeds
Add a sharp, pungent flavour that carries through the pickling vinegar.
Garlic
Adds pungency that mellows and deepens during the long pickling time.

The step that matters

Drying the vegetables after salting. Salt draws water out of the vegetables through osmosis. If they stay damp, the pickle becomes watery and the vinegar is diluted, so the vegetables should be dried thoroughly before layering.

Swap the kidney beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, cauliflower, cucumber, onion, radish, beetroot, mustard):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Sesamefits better
  4. Kidney beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, cauliflower, cucumber, onion, radish, beetroot, 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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