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Chopped Pickles

Pickled mixture of chopped cabbage, green tomatoes, onions, peppers, and spices in vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Chopped Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop the cabbage, green tomatoes, onions, and green peppers finely or process them through a meat grinder.

  2. Sprinkle coarse sea salt over the tomatoes and let them stand for 10 minutes. Drain off the water from the tomatoes.

Make the pickles

  1. Combine the chopped vegetables with mustard, ginger, cloves, mace, cinnamon, sugar, turmeric powder, and celery seed.

  2. Add enough vinegar to cover the mixture.

  3. Cook until the cabbage is tender.

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. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  5. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

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 becomes tender during cooking.
Green tomatoes
Add tartness and body to the pickle mixture.
Onions
Add savory depth and bulk to the pickle.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar and tomatoes with sweetness.
Vinegar
Acidifies the mixture, providing tang and preserving character.

The step that matters

Drain the salted tomatoes. Salt draws water out of the tomatoes by osmosis. Draining this liquid before combining keeps the pickle from becoming watery and helps it thicken as it cooks.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, tomato, onion, pepper, mustard, ginger, clove):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, tomato, onion, pepper, mustard, ginger, clove. 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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