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Chopped Pickle

A pickled mixture of green tomatoes, onions, and peppers seasoned with salt, mustard seed, allspice, cloves, horseradish, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Chopped Pickle

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 ↓

Chopped Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop the green tomatoes, onions, and peppers finely, separately.

  2. Save the water from the chopped tomatoes and mix it with the chopped vegetables.

  3. Add the coarse sea salt and let the mixture stand overnight.

  4. Drain the mixture well.

Season and pour vinegar

  1. Add the mustard seed, ground allspice, ground cloves, and grated horseradish.

  2. Pour the boiling vinegar over the mixture.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Mustard + allspicetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Allspice + horseradishtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Make up the bulk of the pickle and add a tart, fresh body.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the vegetables overnight, firming them and concentrating flavor.
Mustard seed
Adds a sharp, pungent bite that carries through the pickle.
Ground allspice
Contributes warm, aromatic spice notes.
Boiling vinegar
Provides acidity that sharpens flavor and helps preserve the pickle.
Grated horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that fades as the pickle rests.

The step that matters

Drain the mixture well. Draining removes the water the salt drew out overnight. Leftover liquid dilutes the boiling vinegar, which can make the pickle taste weak and its texture soft.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, pepper, mustard, allspice, clove, horseradish, vinegar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Radishfits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, pepper, mustard, allspice, clove, horseradish, vinegar. 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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