Skip to main content
Main

Stuffed Peppers

A dish of bell peppers filled with cabbage, mustard, celery seed, horseradish, onion, cucumber, and cold vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Stuffed Peppers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut around the stem of each bell pepper and remove it along with all the seeds.

  2. In a bowl, mix the chopped cabbage, white mustard seed, celery seed, coarse sea salt, and grated horseradish.

Stuff and pickle

  1. Fill each pepper with the stuffing mixture, adding a small onion and a little cucumber to each.

  2. Reattach the stem to each pepper, place them in a jar, and cover 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. Horseradish + cucumbertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together640 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Mustard + cucumbertop 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

Bell peppers
Form the hollow vessel that holds the filling and softens as it pickles.
Chopped cabbage
Provides the bulk of the filling and a crisp, crunchy texture.
White mustard seed
Adds sharp, pungent flavor that mellows during pickling.
Celery seed
Adds a warm, aromatic savory note to the filling.
Grated horseradish
Contributes sharp heat and pungency to the filling.
Cold vinegar
Acidifies the jar, giving the pickled flavor and helping preserve the vegetables.

The step that matters

Covering with cold vinegar. The vinegar must fully cover the peppers so no part is exposed to air. Exposed vegetables can spoil or grow mold, and the acid is what gives the pickle its tang and keeps it stable.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, cabbage, mustard, celery, horseradish, cucumber, 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.

More stuffed bell peppers recipes

Brazilian 3 See all 65 →

You might also like

Cream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesRed CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipesStewed CabbageStewed Cabbage58 recipesBaked CabbageBaked Cabbage51 recipes