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Mustard Pickles

A pickled mixture of cucumbers, onions, and cauliflower in mustard, sugar, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Mustard Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the vegetables

  1. Sprinkle cucumbers with coarse sea salt.

  2. Sprinkle onions with coarse sea salt.

  3. Sprinkle cauliflower with coarse sea salt.

  4. Let the salted vegetables sit in water overnight.

Make the pickling liquid

  1. Combine the remaining ingredients with a little cold vinegar.

  2. Heat the rest of the vinegar to boiling.

  3. Pour the boiling vinegar over the hard pickles three times.

  4. Add all ingredients to the pickles.

  5. Let the mixture simmer.

  6. Pour the simmered mixture over the pickles.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Mustard + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,279 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

Cucumbers
Form the crisp, firm body of the pickles.
Onions
Add savory sweetness and bulk to the pickles.
Cauliflower
Adds firm texture and absorbs the pickling brine.
Cider vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickles.
Mustard
Supplies the sharp, pungent flavor that defines the pickles.
Brown sugar
Balances the vinegar's acidity with sweetness.

The step that matters

Salting the vegetables overnight. Salt draws water out of the cucumbers, onions and cauliflower through osmosis. Removing that water before pickling keeps the vegetables crisp rather than soft and watery in the finished jar.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, cauliflower, cider, vinegar, mustard, sugar, turmeric. 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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