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French Pickle

A pickled vegetable mixture of tomatoes, onions, peppers, cauliflower, cabbage, and small pickles, seasoned with salt, vinegar, spices, sugar, and oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and turmeric match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 514 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

French Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Slice all vegetables except cauliflower and pickles.

  2. Sprinkle with 1½ cups coarse sea salt and let stand for 24 hours.

  3. Wash in cold water and drain thoroughly.

Make the pickle

  1. Boil vinegar with spices in a bag for 10 minutes.

  2. Add 1 cup sugar and 1 cup salad oil or butter to the vinegar mixture.

  3. Drop in the sliced vegetables and scald well, but do not boil.

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 + turmerictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together514 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cauliflower + cabbagetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together305 recipes

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

  3. Turmeric + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Supply the bulk of the pickle and their natural tartness balances the vinegar.
Onions
Add savour and body, softening during scalding to blend into the pickle.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the vegetables, firming them and concentrating their flavour before pickling.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the vegetables and gives the pickle its sharp taste.
Sugar
Softens the sharpness of the vinegar and rounds out the sweet-sour balance.
Salad oil or butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the pickle a smoother mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Scald the vegetables without boiling. Boiling the vegetables in the vinegar would overcook them and turn them soft and mushy. Gentle scalding heats them through while keeping their texture firm and crisp.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Broccolifits better
  3. Cucumberfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, cauliflower, cabbage, vinegar, turmeric, celery. 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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