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To Pickle Red Cabbage

A pickled cabbage dish using salt, saltpetre, vinegar, cloves, allspice, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

To Pickle Red Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Strip off the outer leaves and cut out the stalk of the cabbage.

  2. Quarter the cabbage lengthwise and cut it crosswise into thick slices.

  3. Place the cabbage in a sieve and sprinkle with salt and saltpetre.

  4. Let it drain for 24 hours, then squeeze until very dry.

Pickle

  1. Make a pickle with enough vinegar to cover the cabbage, adding equal amounts of whole cloves and allspice, and a little whole mace.

  2. Pour the pickle over the cabbage.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Allspice + macetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Cabbage + allspicetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together443 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Cabbage + clovetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together933 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Red cabbage
Provides the bulk of the dish and the pigments that turn the pickle a deep colour.
Salt
Draws water out of the cabbage through osmosis, leaving it crisp and dry enough to hold the pickle.
Vinegar
Acidifies the pickle, preserving the cabbage and keeping its colour bright.
Whole cloves and allspice
Add warm, aromatic spice flavour to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Squeezing the cabbage until very dry. Removing as much water as possible before pickling keeps the cabbage crisp and stops the vinegar being diluted, so the pickle keeps well and stays firm.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, clove, allspice, mace):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, clove, allspice, mace. 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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