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Stuffed Mangoes or Peppers

Green peppers stuffed with a seasoned cabbage mixture and pickled in vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 481 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stuffed Mangoes or Peppers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peppers

  1. Cut the tops off the green peppers and remove the seeds.

  2. Fill the peppers with coarse sea salt and cover with cold water.

  3. Let them stand for two days, then drain and leave in cold water for one day.

Stuff and pack

  1. Prepare the stuffing by mixing minced cabbage, grated horseradish, minced onion, powdered mace, ground nutmeg, ground ginger, celery seed, whole peppercorns, ground mustard, sugar, and salad oil.

  2. Stuff the peppers with the mixture and tie the tops on with soft twine.

  3. Pack the stuffed peppers in a crock and fill with boiling vinegar.

Scald and mature

  1. Repeat the scalding process a week later.

  2. Cover and let them stand for several months before using.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Nutmeg + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  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
Form the vessel that holds the stuffing and absorbs the pickling flavour.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the peppers, softening them and preparing them for pickling.
Salad oil
Adds fat that carries the spice flavours through the stuffing.
Boiling vinegar
Acidity preserves the peppers and gives the pickle its sharp, tangy flavour.

The step that matters

Scald the peppers with boiling vinegar. Boiling vinegar pours over the stuffed peppers in the crock. Hot vinegar penetrates the peppers and helps preserve them, while the repeat scalding a week later reinforces this and keeps the peppers firm and safe during long storage.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, cabbage, horseradish, onion, nutmeg, ginger, celery):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, cabbage, horseradish, onion, nutmeg, ginger, 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.

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