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Salad

Chow-chow

Chow Chow is a pickled relish of tomatoes, onions, peppers, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Chow-chow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Sprinkle the chopped tomatoes, onions, and green peppers with coarse sea salt and let them stand overnight.

  2. Drain off the liquid.

  3. Cover the mixture with vinegar and cook slowly for one hour. Drain again.

  4. Pack the mixture tightly into a jar.

Make the syrup and finish

  1. In a separate pot, combine sugar, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, black pepper, ground mustard, horseradish, and enough vinegar to mix well.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Pour the boiling mixture over the packed vegetables in the jar and cover tightly.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the relish and release liquid that salting draws out.
Onions
Add savory flavor and body to the relish as they soften during cooking.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and helps preserve the relish by binding water.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens flavor and helps keep the relish preserved.
Green peppers
Add fresh, vegetal bite and texture to the chopped vegetable mix.

The step that matters

Drain the salted vegetables thoroughly. Salt draws water out of the tomatoes, onions, and peppers. Draining off that liquid before packing keeps the relish from becoming watery and helps it stay crisp-textured rather than diluted in the jar.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper, vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, allspice, clove):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, allspice, clove. 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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