Skip to main content
Main

Chopped Pickles

A pickled mixture of cabbage, onions, green peppers, and ripe peppers seasoned with salt, horseradish, sugar, mustard seed, cloves, black pepper, celery seed, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Chopped Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the cabbage, onions, green peppers, and ripe peppers together.

  2. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and let sit overnight.

  3. Drain well in the morning.

Cook

  1. Add grated horseradish, sugar, mustard seed, cloves, black pepper, and celery seed.

  2. Cover with vinegar and boil for 1 hour.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  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

Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the chopped pickle and gives it a crisp, sturdy texture.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the vegetables, firming them and concentrating their flavour before pickling.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar and adds sweetness to the pickle.
Vinegar
Acidifies the mixture, preserving the vegetables and giving the pickle its tang.
Grated horseradish
Adds a sharp, pungent heat that mellows during cooking.

The step that matters

Drain well in the morning. Salt draws out a lot of liquid overnight. If the vegetables are not drained thoroughly, excess water dilutes the vinegar and sugar, leading to a watery, less flavourful pickle.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, pepper, horseradish, sugar, mustard, clove, 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.

You might also like

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