Skip to main content
Main

Green Pepper Mango Pickles

Pickled green peppers preserved with salt, vinegar, alum, and a spice mixture of cabbage, horseradish, ginger, mustard, mace, cloves, cinnamon, and oil or butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Radish and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 297 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Green Pepper Mango Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peppers

  1. Seed the green peppers and soak them in a mixture of salt and water for 10 days.

  2. After 10 days, soak the peppers in clear water for 24 hours.

  3. Pack the peppers in a jar and scald them with a mixture of vinegar and water, adding a small piece of alum, for three consecutive days.

Make the stuffing

  1. Prepare the stuffing by finely chopping 1 pound of dried cabbage and scraping and drying the horse-radish.

  2. Pound the ginger, mustard, mace, cloves, and cinnamon until fine.

  3. Mix the chopped cabbage, horse-radish, and pounded spices with salad oil or fresh butter.

Pack and seal

  1. Sew each pepper closed and pack them in a jar.

  2. Boil strong vinegar and pour it over the packed peppers.

  3. Cover the jar tightly to keep the steam in.

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. Radish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together297 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Cabbage + radishtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together106 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

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

  4. Horse + radishtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together529 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  5. Pepper + cabbagetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 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

Green peppers
The main vegetable, which is seeded, cured in brine and then packed whole.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the peppers and preserves them during the long brine soak.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that preserves the peppers and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Dried cabbage
Forms the bulk of the stuffing, adding texture and body to each pepper.
Salad oil or fresh butter
Binds the stuffing together and adds richness and moisture.
Mace
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavour to the stuffing.

The step that matters

Scald with vinegar and alum over three days. Repeated scalding in acidic vinegar with alum helps the peppers firm up and resist softening. Heating too hard or too long can turn them limp, so keep the water below a full boil and repeat the process on each of the three days as written.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, vinegar, cabbage, horse, radish, ginger, mustard):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, vinegar, cabbage, horse, radish, ginger, mustard. 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.

You might also like

Horseradish SauceHorseradish Sauce23 recipesHorseradish ButterHorseradish Butter6 recipesRed CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipesStewed CabbageStewed Cabbage58 recipes