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Yellow Pickle

A pickled cabbage dish flavored with ginger, horseradish, garlic, mustard seed, mace, nutmeg, peppers, turmeric, brown sugar, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Yellow Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Scald the vegetables in brine strong enough to float an egg.

  2. Let them remain for 2 days, then squeeze them well in a towel.

  3. Put them in a jar, covering with cold vinegar colored with 1 ounce of turmeric.

  4. Let them remain for 2 weeks.

Cook and pack

  1. Place the vegetables with the 2 gallons of vinegar, spices, and sugar in a bright kettle over a clear fire.

  2. Boil for 15 to 20 minutes.

  3. Pour into a jar and tie up immediately with leather or enameled cloth.

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. Ginger + turmerictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Mustard + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,279 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Horseradish + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together437 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

White mustard seed
Adds sharp, pungent flavor that balances the sweetness of the sugar.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and rounds out the sharpness of the vinegar and spices.
Vinegar
Acts as the pickling liquid that preserves the cabbage and gives it acidity.
Turmeric
Gives the pickle its yellow color and adds a mild, earthy aroma.
Early york cabbage
Forms the bulk of the pickle, providing crisp texture once brined and cooked.

The step that matters

Squeezing the brined vegetables dry. Excess brine left in the vegetables dilutes the vinegar and weakens the pickling liquid, so they should be pressed well before they go into the jar.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ginger, horseradish, garlic, mustard, nutmeg, pepper, turmeric):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, horseradish, garlic, mustard, nutmeg, pepper, turmeric. 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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