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Pickle Salad

A pickled salad of onions, cucumbers, cabbage, cauliflower, green tomatoes, peppers, celery, and a mustard‑turmeric‑flour‑sugar dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and cauliflower 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 ↓

Pickle Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop onions, cucumbers, cabbage, cauliflower, green tomatoes, and green peppers finely.

  2. Place chopped vegetables in a stone jar.

  3. Pour weak brine over the vegetables.

  4. Let the mixture stand overnight.

  5. Drain the vegetables.

  6. Scald the drained vegetables in weak vinegar until tender.

  7. Drain the vegetables again.

  8. Let the vegetables cool.

  9. Add chopped celery to the cooled vegetables.

Make the dressing and pack

  1. In a bowl, mix ground mustard, turmeric powder, wheat flour, and brown sugar.

  2. Stir the mixture into boiling vinegar.

  3. Pour the dressing over the vegetable mixture.

  4. Stir the mixture well.

  5. Can the salad while hot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Green cucumbers
Provide the crisp, bulky vegetable body of the salad.
Cabbage
Adds firm texture and bulk that holds up through pickling.
Brown sugar
Balances the sharp vinegar with sweetness and adds depth to the dressing.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the whole salad.
Ground mustard
Adds pungent, sharp flavour that complements the vinegar and sugar.
Wheat flour
Thickens the dressing so it coats the vegetables rather than running off.

The step that matters

Scald the drained vegetables in weak vinegar until tender. Scalding softens the firm vegetables enough to absorb the dressing, but overcooking turns them mushy. Cooling and draining afterwards keeps excess liquid from diluting the dressing and weakening the pickle.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, cabbage, cauliflower, tomato, pepper, celery, mustard):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, cabbage, cauliflower, tomato, pepper, celery, 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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