Skip to main content
Main

Pickled Cibbage

A pickled cabbage and onion mixture preserved with vinegar, sugar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mustard and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Pickled Cibbage

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the vegetables

  1. Pack the chopped cabbage and onions in alternate layers, sprinkling coarse sea salt between each layer.

  2. Let them sit in the salt overnight.

Brine and pour over

  1. Scald the vinegar and add the sugar, mustard (wet with cold water), pepper, cinnamon, celery seed, allspice, mace, and pulverized alum.

  2. Pour the mixture over the cabbage and onions.

  3. Repeat this process for three mornings.

Cook and jar

  1. On the last morning, heat everything together and boil for five minutes.

  2. Once cooled, pack the mixture into small jars.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  5. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage
Forms the crisp bulk of the pickle and keeps its crunch through the brining.
Onions
Add sharpness and aroma that mellow during the salting and cooking.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickle.
Sugar
Balances the sharp vinegar with sweetness.
Alum
Helps the cabbage stay firm and crisp during pickling.

The step that matters

Salting overnight. Salt draws water out of the cabbage and onions by osmosis. Enough salt and time firm the vegetables so they stay crisp rather than turning soft and watery in the hot brine.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, vinegar, sugar, mustard, pepper, cinnamon, celery. 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.

More pickled cabbage recipes

Yellow 12Sweet 6Red 4Spiced 3 See all 87 →

You might also like

Cream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesRed CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipesStewed CabbageStewed Cabbage58 recipesBaked CabbageBaked Cabbage51 recipes