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Pepper Hash

A preserved pepper mixture cooked with vinegar, sugar, salt, mustard seed, and horseradish, then canned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Pepper Hash

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove seeds from the sweet red and hot green peppers.

  2. Chop the peppers and onions together.

Cook

  1. In a pot, combine the chopped mixture with vinegar, water, brown sugar, coarse sea salt, and white mustard seed.

  2. Cook for 1 hour over medium heat.

  3. Add grated horseradish and cook for an additional 10 minutes.

  4. Can and seal the mixture.

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. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  3. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 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

Sweet red peppers
Provide the bulk of the relish and its sweet, colorful flesh.
Onions
Add savory depth and body as they soften during the long simmer.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that gives the relish its tang and helps preserve it.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the acidity of the vinegar.
White mustard seed
Contributes sharp, pungent flavor that mellows during cooking.
Grated horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that intensifies with cooking time.

The step that matters

Adding the horseradish. Horseradish loses its sharp pungency with prolonged heat, so it is added near the end for a brief final cook. Adding it too early leaves the flavor flat.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Radishfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, vinegar, sugar, mustard, horseradish. 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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