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Chopped Cabbage Pickle

A pickled cabbage dish with onion, sugar, mustard, spices, and optional celery and nasturtiums.

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

Brine the cabbage

  1. Cut the cabbage for slaw and pour boiling brine over it to cover.

  2. Chop and scald the onion in the same way, then cover both and let sit for 24 hours.

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

  4. If too salty, soak in clear water for a few hours and squeeze again.

Mix and pickle

  1. Loosen and mix the cabbage and onions thoroughly.

  2. 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.

  3. Mix well and cover with cold vinegar, adding more vinegar if necessary after it has stood.

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 crisp, bulky body of the pickle, which holds its texture after brining.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Mustard seed
Provides pungent flavour and a little texture in the finished pickle.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that mellows during the pickling.
Cold vinegar
Acidity that preserves the vegetables and gives the pickle its tang.

The step that matters

Squeezing out the brine. Salt left in the cabbage and onion will make the pickle too salty, and too little squeezing leaves excess liquid that dilutes the vinegar. Squeezing thoroughly, and soaking in fresh water if it is still too salty, controls both flavour and keeping quality.

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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