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White Cabbage, to Pickle

A pickled cabbage prepared with salt, spices, vinegar, and alum, left to ferment for weeks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and turmeric match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,776 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

White Cabbage, to Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Remove the outer leaves from the cabbage, sprinkle coarse sea salt on it, and let it sit for 2 hours.

  2. Wash the cabbage in cold water, drain, and cut it into very thin shreds.

  3. Make a strong brine that can float an egg, pour it over the shredded cabbage, and let it sit for 2 weeks, stirring daily.

Make the pickling vinegar

  1. Boil enough vinegar to cover the cabbage for 5 minutes with the spices: ginger, black pepper, long pepper, cloves, turmeric mixed with a little cold vinegar, mustard seed, and alum.

  2. Skim the vinegar and pour it hot over the cabbage, then let it sit for 3 days.

  3. Drain the vinegar, boil it again, and pour it hot over the cabbage.

Pack and cover

  1. Pack the cabbage into bottles or unglazed jars, dividing the spices among them, and cover completely with vinegar; add more boiled and cooled vinegar as needed.

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Turmeric + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,279 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Cabbage + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,645 recipes

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

  5. Clove + turmerictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,876 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

White cabbage
Forms the crisp, shredded body of the pickle that soaks up the brine and vinegar.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cabbage and starts the fermentation-based softening and preservation.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the cabbage and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Ginger
Adds warm, aromatic pungency to the pickling vinegar.
Mustard seed
Contributes a sharp, pungent flavour that infuses into the vinegar.

The step that matters

Making the strong brine. The brine must be salty enough to float an egg, because too little salt lets spoilage microbes grow instead of the beneficial fermentation that protects the cabbage. Stirring daily keeps the cabbage evenly submerged and exposed to the brine.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, vinegar, ginger, pepper, turmeric, mustard, garlic):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Corianderfits better
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, vinegar, ginger, pepper, turmeric, mustard, garlic. 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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