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Boiled Yellow Pickle

A pickled cabbage dish flavored with mustard, horseradish, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and horseradish 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 ↓

Boiled Yellow Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Scald the cabbage and onions in boiling vinegar for 15 minutes.

  2. Drain well and set aside.

Make the spice mixture

  1. In a bowl, mix the olive oil and ground mustard.

  2. Add the celery seed, horseradish, sugar, turmeric, cloves, mace, and black pepper; mix well.

  3. Thin the mixture with vinegar as needed.

Pack and cover

  1. Layer the cabbage and onion in a jar, adding the spice mixture between layers.

  2. Cover the entire mixture with cold vinegar.

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. Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage
Forms the crisp, bulky body of the pickle that holds the spices.
Onions
Add mild sweetness and aroma that soften during the scalding step.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickle.
Ground mustard
Adds pungent heat and helps bind the spice paste with the oil.
Turmeric
Gives the pickle its yellow colour and an earthy flavour.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.

The step that matters

Thin the mixture with vinegar as needed. The spice paste must be loose enough to coat and penetrate the cabbage layers. Too thick a paste stays in clumps, leaving some cabbage bland and unevenly preserved in the acidic brine.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, vinegar, mustard, celery, horseradish, sugar, turmeric):

  1. Cauliflowerfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Radishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, vinegar, mustard, celery, horseradish, sugar, 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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