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Delicious Pickled Cabbage

A pickled cabbage dish made by boiling cabbage with vinegar and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Delicious Pickled Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the cabbage finely.

  2. Place the chopped cabbage, vinegar, and spices in a kettle.

Boil and add spices

  1. Boil for five minutes.

  2. Tie the spices in bags and add them to the kettle.

Store

  1. Store in a cool place.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  5. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

White cabbage
Forms the bulk of the pickle and provides its crisp texture.
Cider vinegar
Provides the acidity that pickles the cabbage and gives it its sour taste.
Cloves
Adds warm, pungent aroma to the pickling liquid.
Cinnamon
Adds sweet, woody aroma to the pickling liquid.
Allspice
Adds warm, complex aroma to the pickling liquid.
Mace
Adds delicate, nutmeg-like aroma to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Boil for five minutes. Heat helps the vinegar and spices penetrate the cabbage and blend their flavours. Boiling too long, however, softens the cabbage and dulls its crispness, so timing matters.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cider, vinegar, clove, cinnamon, allspice, mace):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, vinegar, clove, cinnamon, allspice, mace. 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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