Name: Pickle Vegetables
Ingredients: 2 quarts good vinegar; 2 ounces bruised ginger; 1 ounce whole white pepper; 1 ounce allspice; 1 ounce turmeric; 1 ounce curry powder; 2 ounces shallots; 2 ounces best Durham mustard; water (for mixing mustard)

Why it works: Ginger and turmeric match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,776 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Pickle Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the vinegar with ginger, white pepper, allspice, turmeric, curry powder, and shallots for 5 minutes.
Mix the mustard with a little warm vinegar until smooth.
Stir the mustard mixture into the vinegar; do not boil after adding mustard.
Let the vinegar cool, then pour it over the dried vegetables in a large dish.
Ensure the vegetables are fully covered with vinegar and store in jars, intermixing the spices.
Cover jars with bladder to exclude air and check periodically, adding more boiled vinegar as needed.

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.

Ginger + turmerictop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,776 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Shallot + mustardtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together859 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Ginger + allspicetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,620 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Turmeric + shallottop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together282 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,928 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, ginger, allspice, turmeric, shallot, mustard):

Tarragonfits better
Clovefits better
Cardamomfits better
White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, ginger, allspice, turmeric, shallot, mustard. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.