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Boiled Yellow Pickle

A pickled cabbage dish with onions, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Yellow Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scald the cabbage and onions in boiling vinegar with salt for 15 minutes.

  2. Drain well and mix the mustard and olive oil in a bowl.

  3. Add vinegar to thin the mixture.

Pack and cover

  1. Layer the cabbage and onions in a jar with the spices in between.

  2. Cover the entire mixture with cold vinegar.

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. Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cabbage + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together481 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Horseradish + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together437 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage
Forms the crisp, bulky body of the pickle that holds its texture under brine.
Onions
Add sweetness and savour that mellows as the pickle sits in vinegar.
Ground mustard
Adds pungent heat and sharpness that balances the vinegar's acidity.
Turmeric
Gives the pickle its bright yellow colour.
White sugar
Softens the sharp bite of the vinegar with gentle sweetness.

The step that matters

Scald the cabbage and onions in boiling vinegar. Scalding softens the vegetables just enough to take up the brine and makes them pack tightly in the jar. Under-scalding leaves them crunchy and prone to floating, while over-scalding turns them limp.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, mustard, celery, horseradish, sugar, turmeric, olive):

  1. Broccolifits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, mustard, celery, horseradish, sugar, turmeric, olive. 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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