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Winter Pickle

A pickled cabbage and beet mixture seasoned with horseradish, sugar, salt, pepper, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 481 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Winter Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine chopped cabbage, cooked beets, horseradish, sugar, salt, and pepper in a large bowl.

  2. Cover the mixture with hot vinegar.

  3. Mix well and let it sit before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  3. Horseradish + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Horseradish + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cabbage + vinegartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 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
Provides the crisp, bulky body that holds the pickle together.
Beets
Supply the color and a mild earthy sweetness to the pickle.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the pickle and offsets the sharpness of the vinegar.
Hot vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickle.

The step that matters

Let it sit before serving. Vinegar and sugar need time to penetrate the cabbage and beets. Serving too soon leaves the vegetables crunchy and the flavors sharp and unblended.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, sugar, pepper, vinegar):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Radishfits about as well
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, sugar, pepper, 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.

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