Skip to main content
Main

Mustard Pickles

Pickled cucumbers, onions, and cauliflower flavored with mustard, brown sugar, and cider vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. Sprinkle cucumbers, onions, and cauliflower separately with coarse sea salt and cover with water. Let sit overnight.

Make the mustard sauce

  1. Combine mustard, brown sugar, and a little cold vinegar in a large pot.

  2. Heat the remaining cider vinegar to boiling.

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

  4. Add all ingredients to the pot. Let simmer.

  5. Pour the 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, bulky body of the pickle.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma that mellow during simmering.
Cauliflower
Adds firm texture and absorbs the pickling sauce.
Cider vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickles.
Mustard
Supplies the sharp flavor and thickens the sauce.
Brown sugar
Balances the acidity with sweetness and deepens flavor.

The step that matters

Pour the boiling cider vinegar over the pickles three times. Salted vegetables must be drained and rinsed of excess salt before brining. Pouring boiling vinegar repeatedly heats the vegetables and helps them stay crisp while they absorb the acid, so the pickles are safely preserved.

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.

More mustard pickles recipes

Mixed 7 See all 151 →

You might also like

Cauliflower SoupCauliflower Soup28 recipesCream of Cauliflower SoupCream of Cauliflower Soup22 recipesCreamed CauliflowerCreamed Cauliflower17 recipesHam in CiderHam in Cider10 recipes