Name: Chow Chow
Ingredients: 3 cabbages, shredded; 25 peppers, finely chopped; ½ pint mustard seed; 3 sticks horseradish, chipped; coarse sea salt; cold vinegar; 2 ounces sugar per quart of vinegar

Why it works: Mustard and horseradish 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 ↓

Chow Chow

Ingredients

Directions

Layer shredded cabbage in a jar, sprinkling a little coarse sea salt.
Add a layer of chopped peppers, then sprinkle with horseradish and mustard seed.
Repeat layers until all ingredients are used.
Fill jars with cold vinegar, dissolving 2 ounces of sugar in each quart.

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.

Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,832 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Cabbage + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together481 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Cabbage + mustardtop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,645 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,081 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14,067 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 pickle, providing crisp texture once salted and covered in vinegar.
Peppers: Add heat and bulk, flavouring the layers as the vinegar soaks through.
Mustard seed: Adds a sharp, pungent flavour that mellows during pickling.
Horseradish: Contributes sharp, pungent heat that carries through the pickled layers.
Sugar: Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.

Swap the cabbage

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

Radishfits better
Beetrootfits better
Shallotfits about as well
Cabbagethe original

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