Skip to main content
Salad

Inexpensive Chow-chow

A pickled cabbage and onion relish with horseradish, mustard, sugar, and spices.

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

Why it works: Horseradish and mustard 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 ↓

Inexpensive Chow-chow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Slice the cabbages and onions thinly, then sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  2. The next day, drain the vegetables and place them in a pot with the vinegar.

Cook and jar

  1. Bring the mixture to a boil, then add all the other ingredients.

  2. Cook for about 15 minutes.

  3. Transfer the chow-chow into jars and seal.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Cabbages
Form the bulk of the relish and, once salted and drained, give it a crisp, tender texture.
Onions
Add savory sweetness and bulk, softening as they cook in the vinegar.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the vegetables and gives the relish its tang.
Brown sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness and helps round out the flavor.
White mustard seed
Contributes sharp, pungent heat that mellows during cooking.

The step that matters

Salting and draining the vegetables. Salt draws water out of the cabbage and onions through osmosis. Draining well before adding the vinegar keeps the relish crisp and stops it from becoming watery and diluted.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Broccolifits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, horseradish, pepper, mustard, sugar, celery, garlic. 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 chow-chow recipes

Tomato 9Relish 8Mustard 6Virginia 5Pickle 4 See all 29 →

You might also like

Cabbage DressingCabbage Dressing9 recipesChicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipes