Name: Chow-chow
Ingredients: 3 heads of cabbage, finely chopped; 12 peppers, chopped; ½ pint mustard seed; grated horseradish; coarse sea salt; cold vinegar; 2 tablespoons brown 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 the jar

In a jar, layer the chopped cabbage and chopped peppers.
Sprinkle a little coarse sea salt, horseradish, and mustard seed over each layer.
Continue layering until all ingredients are in the jar.

Add the vinegar

Cover the mixture with cold vinegar.
Dissolve 2 tablespoons of brown sugar in each quart of vinegar used.

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

Cabbage: Forms the bulk of the pickle and provides its crisp, crunchy texture.
Cold vinegar: Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickle.
Brown sugar: Balances the sharp acidity of the vinegar with a touch of sweetness.
Mustard seed: Adds a sharp, pungent flavour that deepens as the pickle sits.

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.