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New Spanish Pickle

A pickled mixture of cucumbers, cabbage, onions, and spices in vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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 ↓

New Spanish Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Cut cucumbers and cabbage into small squares.

  2. Combine cucumbers, cabbage, and onions in a bowl.

  3. Sprinkle with salt.

  4. Let stand for 1 hour.

Make the pickle

  1. Scald the mixture in vinegar.

  2. Add horseradish, Lexington mustard, celery seed, turmeric, sugar, white mustard seed, and pepper pods, then mix well.

  3. Store in a jar.

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. Cucumber + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together640 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Mustard + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,279 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, watery bulk that the pickle is built on.
Cabbage
Adds crunch and body that holds up through the pickling.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves the vegetables and gives the pickle its tang.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar and mustard.
White mustard seed
Adds pungent, sharp flavour as the seeds soften in the hot brine.

The step that matters

Scald the mixture in vinegar. Heating the vegetables in vinegar softens them and lets the acid penetrate, but overheating turns them mushy. Keep it hot enough to scald, not to boil down the vegetables.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, cabbage, vinegar, horseradish, mustard, celery, turmeric):

  1. Cauliflowerfits better
  2. Radishfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, cabbage, vinegar, horseradish, mustard, celery, turmeric. 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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