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Oil Pickle Cabbage

A pickled cabbage preserved in a mixture of sweet oil, mustard, horseradish, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 ↓

Oil Pickle Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim and quarter the cabbage heads.

  2. Boil the cabbage in a mixture of vinegar and water until a broomstick can be passed through them.

Make the paste

  1. Prepare a paste with the sweet oil, white mustard, black mustard, chopped horseradish, celery seed, turmeric, and brown sugar.

Layer and pickle

  1. Layer the cabbage in a container, covering each layer with the paste mixture and good vinegar.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Horseradish + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together437 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 pickle and absorbs the paste and vinegar flavours as it softens.
Sweet oil
Carries the mustard and spice flavours and coats the cabbage, adding richness.
White mustard
Adds sharp pungency that mellows during pickling.
Black mustard
Contributes a hotter, more pungent bite to the paste.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, volatile heat that gives the pickle its characteristic bite.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar and mustards.

The step that matters

Boiling the cabbage until a broomstick passes through. Cooking until the cabbage is tender but not falling apart lets it take up the paste and vinegar evenly. Under-boiled cabbage stays firm and pickles unevenly, while over-boiled cabbage turns mushy.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Celerythe original

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