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Mustard Pickles

A pickled mixture of peppers, onions, carrots, cauliflower, and cucumbers in a mustard‑flavored brine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 584 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Mustard Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Boil the onions, carrots, and cauliflower in salt water until tender.

  2. Thoroughly drain the vegetables.

Make the mustard sauce

  1. In a pot, mix vinegar, ground mustard, sugar, salt, flour, turmeric, and celery seed.

  2. Boil the mixture until it thickens to the consistency of Dutch mustard.

  3. Remove the mixture from heat.

Combine

  1. Stir in the prepared vegetables.

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

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

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

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

  3. Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  5. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 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

Flour
Thickens the mustard sauce so it becomes smooth and spreadable rather than watery.
Ground mustard
Provides the sharp, pungent flavor that defines the pickle.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickle flavor.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar and mustard with sweetness.
Cauliflower
Forms the firm, crisp bulk of the pickle after being cooked until tender.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until it thickens. Flour thickens the sauce only when it is boiled long enough for its starch to swell. Stopping early leaves the sauce thin and runny, so the pickles will not coat well.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, carrot, cauliflower, cucumber, vinegar, mustard, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, carrot, cauliflower, cucumber, vinegar, mustard, sugar. 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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