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Chopped Cabbage Pickle

A pickled cabbage dish with onion, sugar, mustard, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Chopped Cabbage Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Cut the cabbage into slaw pieces.

  2. Pour boiling brine over the cabbage until it is covered.

  3. Chop and scald the onion.

  4. Cover the cabbage and onion and let sit for 24 hours.

  5. Squeeze the cabbage and onion in a cloth until free from brine.

  6. If the mixture is too salty, soak it in clear water for a few hours.

  7. Squeeze the mixture again.

  8. Loosen and mix the cabbage and onions thoroughly.

Season and pack

  1. In a large bowl, combine the cabbage mixture with brown sugar, mustard, mustard seed, horseradish, mace, black pepper, celery seed, turmeric, and optional chopped celery and nasturtiums.

  2. Cover the mixture with cold vinegar.

  3. Add more vinegar if necessary after it has stood for a while.

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

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

  5. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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 pickle and stays crisp-textured after brining and squeezing.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharp vinegar and mustard.
White mustard seed
Provides pungent flavor and crunch in the finished pickle.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that complements the mustard flavors.
Cold vinegar
Acidifies the mixture, preserving it and giving it tang.
Turmeric
Gives the pickle its characteristic yellow color and earthy flavor.

The step that matters

Squeezing out the brine. Cabbage left wet with brine dilutes the vinegar and makes the pickle too salty. Squeezing thoroughly, then soaking if still salty, controls both salt level and texture.

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, onion, sugar, mustard, horseradish, mace, pepper):

  1. Allspicefits about as well
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Celerythe original
  4. Turmericfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, onion, sugar, mustard, horseradish, mace, pepper. 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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