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Mustard Pickles

Pickled vegetables in a mustard‑flavored brine.

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 ↓

Mustard Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Make a weak brine and soak all vegetables overnight.

  2. Drain the vegetables.

Make the sauce

  1. In a porcelain kettle, boil 2 quarts of vinegar.

  2. Make a paste of 1 cup sugar with a little water.

  3. Add 6 tablespoons mustard, 1 tablespoon turmeric, 1 cup flour, and the sugar paste to the boiling vinegar.

  4. Stir well and pour over the drained vegetables.

Pack and seal

  1. Mix thoroughly and seal in jars.

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
Provide the crisp, bulky vegetable base that holds the sauce.
Cauliflower
Adds firm texture that holds its bite after soaking and pickling.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the vegetables and gives the pickle its sharpness.
Mustard
Supplies the pungent, sharp flavor that defines mustard pickles.
Flour
Thickens the boiling vinegar into a smooth, coating sauce.
Sugar
Balances the acidity of the vinegar with sweetness.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and mustard to the boiling vinegar. Flour must be fully blended into the paste and hot vinegar, then stirred well, or it clumps and leaves the sauce lumpy and unevenly thickened.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, cauliflower, pepper, vinegar, mustard, turmeric, flour. 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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