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Pickled Peppers

A pickled pepper relish made with vinegar, mustard seed, sugar, celery seed, and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Pickled Peppers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Finely slice the peppers and onion.

  2. Layer them in a bowl and sprinkle with coarse sea salt. Let sit for three hours.

  3. Squeeze out excess liquid several times.

Make the pickle and jar

  1. Boil enough vinegar to cover the vegetables.

  2. For each quart of vinegar, add 1½ tablespoons of white mustard seed, 1 teacup of sugar, 1 tablespoon of celery seed, and a little horseradish.

  3. Boil the spices and vinegar briefly, then add the peppers and onion.

  4. Boil for 5 to 10 minutes, then transfer to 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. 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. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  5. Celery + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together835 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

Peppers
Provide the main vegetable bulk and crisp texture that holds up after pickling.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickled vegetables.
Sugar
Balances the sharp acidity of the vinegar with sweetness.
Coarse sea salt
Draws excess liquid out of the peppers and onion, firming their texture.

The step that matters

Squeezing out the excess liquid. Salt draws water out of the vegetables, and that liquid would dilute the vinegar brine and soften the pickle. Squeezing several times removes as much as possible so the brine stays strong and the vegetables stay crisp.

Swap the onion

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

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

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