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Chow-chow

A pickled vegetable relish made with cabbage, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, horseradish, mustard seed, celery seed, sugar, spices, vinegar, mustard, and olive oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and mustard 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 ↓

Chow-chow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Cut the cabbage, cucumbers, and onions into small pieces.

  2. Pack the vegetables in salt overnight and drain thoroughly.

Pickle

  1. Mix all ingredients together.

  2. Pour boiling hot vinegar over the mixture for three mornings.

  3. On the third morning, mix a small box of mustard with 1 pint of olive oil and add it while the pickle is hot.

  4. Seal the mixture.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 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. Cucumber + horseradishtop 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. Cucumber + mustardtop 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

Cabbage
Provides the bulk and crunch of the relish.
Cucumbers
Adds crisp texture and moisture to the mixture.
Onions
Adds sharp, savoury flavour to the pickle.
White mustard seed
Gives a sharp, pungent bite as the pickle steeps.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves the vegetables and sharpens the flavour.

The step that matters

Salting the vegetables overnight. Salt draws water out of the cut vegetables by osmosis, so they stay crisp rather than soggy. Draining thoroughly removes that liquid and keeps the finished pickle from diluting.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, cucumber, onion, horseradish, mustard, celery, sugar. 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 chow-chow recipes

Tomato 9Relish 8Mustard 6Virginia 5Pickle 4 See all 29 →

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