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Sauce

Chow Chow

A pickled relish of cucumbers, onions, cauliflower, and green peppers flavored with mustard, curry powder, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Chow Chow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Combine cucumbers, onions, cauliflower, and green peppers in brine for 24 hours.

  2. Scald the vegetables in the brine.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pot, mix mustard, flour, curry powder, and sugar with a little vinegar to prevent lumps.

  2. Add this mixture to the boiling vinegar and cook until it thickens.

Pack and seal

  1. Pour the hot mixture over the pickles and seal immediately.

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

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

  5. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, pickled vegetable base of the relish.
Cauliflower
Adds firm texture and bulk that holds up to the pickling liquid.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that gives the sauce its characteristic bite.
Flour
Thickens the vinegar sauce so it coats the vegetables.
Curry powder
Contributes warm, spiced aroma and colour to the sauce.
Sugar
Balances the sharp acidity of the vinegar with sweetness.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour and spices with vinegar before adding them to the pot. Dry flour added straight into hot liquid clumps and stays lumpy. Mixing it first into a smooth paste with a little vinegar lets the starch disperse evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly when it reaches the boil.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, cauliflower, pepper, vinegar, mustard, flour, 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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Relish 49Pickle 25Pickles 16Tomato 9Cucumber 4Salad 3 See all 120 →

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