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Pickled Cauliflower

Pickled cauliflower preserved in vinegar, mace, peppercorns, ginger, and alum.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and ginger are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,152 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Pickled Cauliflower

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cauliflower

  1. Select firm, white cauliflowers.

  2. Break the cauliflowers into sprigs.

  3. Place the sprigs in a saucepan and cover with warm water. Add alum and enough coarse sea salt to taste.

  4. Bring the mixture to a boil. Remove from heat and let the mixture sit in a cooler place for 5 minutes.

  5. Lift the cauliflower out of the saucepan and drain the cauliflower on a sieve.

Make the pickling liquid

  1. In a separate pot, boil the vinegar with mace, peppercorns, and ginger for 5 minutes. Allow the vinegar mixture to cool.

Bottle and seal

  1. Fill the glass bottles with the cooled vinegar mixture. Cork the bottles 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. Mace + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,152 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Cauliflower + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Cauliflower + vinegartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together888 recipes

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

  4. Vinegar + gingertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,126 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Vinegar + macetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,415 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Cauliflowers
Form the main body of the pickle, staying firm and crisp when brined.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the cauliflower and gives the pickle its sharp flavor.
Alum
Helps the cauliflower stay firm during the warm-water treatment.
Mace
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavor to the pickling liquid.
Peppercorns
Add pungent, aromatic heat to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Boiling the cauliflower with alum and salt. Boiling only briefly, then letting it sit off the heat, keeps the cauliflower firm; overcooking softens its cell walls and leaves a mushy pickle.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cauliflower, vinegar, ginger):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cauliflower, vinegar, ginger. 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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