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Sauce

Pepper Sauce

A pickled pepper and cabbage sauce with mustard seed, allspice, cloves, salt, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pepper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the red and green peppers finely.

  2. Shred the cabbage using a slaw cutter.

Combine and pack

  1. Mix the cabbage with mustard seed, allspice, cloves, and chopped peppers, then add the coarse sea salt and mix well.

  2. Pack the mixture into jars and cover with cold vinegar.

  3. Let it sit overnight before using.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mustard + allspicetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Cabbage + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,645 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the sauce and provides its crisp, fibrous texture.
Red pepper
Adds sweetness, colour and fresh pepper flavour to the mixture.
Green pepper
Adds a grassy, sharper pepper flavour and more crunch.
Cold vinegar
Provides acidity that gives the sauce its tang and helps preserve it.
Mustard seed
Contributes sharp, pungent heat and a slightly bitter aroma.

The step that matters

Let it sit overnight before using. Resting lets the vinegar soak into the cabbage and peppers and mellows the sharp raw flavours, so the sauce tastes more balanced than it would straight away.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, mustard, allspice, clove, vinegar):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Radishfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, mustard, allspice, clove, vinegar. 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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