Skip to main content
Salad

Corn Relish

A pickled relish of corn, red peppers, cabbage, sugar, vinegar, and ground mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cabbage and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,645 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Corn Relish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the red peppers and cabbage.

  2. Mix the chopped vegetables with the corn, sugar, and vinegar.

Cook and seal

  1. Boil the mixture for 10 minutes.

  2. Seal the relish while it is still hot.

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

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

  2. Pepper + cabbagetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  3. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  5. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn
Provides the bulk and sweet, tender kernels that make up most of the relish.
Red peppers
Add sweetness, colour, and a mild crisp texture to the relish.
Cabbage
Adds body and crunch that holds its texture after cooking.
Sugar
Sweetens the relish and balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the relish its tang and helps preserve it.
Ground mustard
Contributes sharp, pungent mustard flavour to the relish.

The step that matters

Seal the relish while it is still hot. Filling the jars while the relish is hot drives air out and helps create a tight seal as it cools. If it cools first, the seal may be weaker and the relish less well protected from spoilage.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Lettucefits about as well
  4. Cabbagethe original

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

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