Skip to main content
Main

Pickled Red Cabbage

A pickled dish made from sliced red cabbage, salt, vinegar, and peppercorns.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cabbage and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,924 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Pickled Red Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Remove the coarse leaves from the red cabbages and wash them thoroughly.

  2. Cut the cabbages into long, thin slices or shreds.

  3. Place the cabbage in a large sieve and cover it with coarse sea salt.

  4. Let the cabbage sit overnight.

Pickle

  1. Transfer the cabbage to stone jars.

  2. Pour scalding vinegar over the cabbage. Add 1 ounce of whole black peppercorns for each quart of vinegar.

  3. Cover the jars and set aside for use.

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 + vinegartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Red cabbage
Forms the main body of the pickle and gives it its colour and crunch.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cabbage, softening it and concentrating its flavour.
Scalding vinegar
Adds acidity that preserves the cabbage and gives the pickle its sharp taste.

The step that matters

Salting the cabbage overnight. Salt draws moisture out of the cabbage through osmosis. Leaving it in a sieve overnight lets enough liquid drain away so the cabbage stays crisp and the vinegar is not diluted.

“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

Red CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipesStewed CabbageStewed Cabbage58 recipesBaked CabbageBaked Cabbage51 recipesCabbage DressingCabbage Dressing19 recipes