Name: Pickled Cabbage
Ingredients: 1 head red cabbage, cut in thin slices; boiling spiced vinegar; coarse sea salt

Why it works: Cabbage and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,924 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Pickled Cabbage

Ingredients

1 head red cabbage, cut in thin slices
boiling spiced vinegar
coarse sea salt

Directions

Place the sliced cabbage in a jar.
Pour boiling spiced vinegar over the cabbage.
When the mixture is cold, cover it lightly.
In ten days, the pickled cabbage will be ready to use.

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.

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

Red cabbage: Forms the main body of the pickle and absorbs the flavour of the vinegar.
Spiced vinegar: Acidity that preserves the cabbage and gives it its tangy, pickled flavour.

“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.