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To Pickle White and Red Cabbage

A fermented cabbage dish pickled in vinegar with spices, optionally colored with cochineal, beetroot, or turmeric.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and turmeric work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 618 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

To Pickle White and Red Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Remove the outside leaves and stalk from the cabbage.

  2. Shred the cabbage into a colander and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  3. Let it sit for 24 hours, then drain the cabbage.

Pickle and colour

  1. Place the cabbage into jars and fill with boiling vinegar mixed with your choice of spices.

  2. For red cabbage, add a little cochineal or slices of beet-root for color.

  3. For white cabbage, add a little turmeric powder.

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 + turmerictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together618 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  3. Vinegar + turmerictop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,214 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 crisp, crunchy body of the pickle that holds the brine.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the shredded cabbage, softening and seasoning it before pickling.
Boiling vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the cabbage and gives it its sharp, tangy flavour.

The step that matters

Draining after the 24-hour salting. Salt pulls moisture out of the cabbage; if it is not drained well, excess liquid dilutes the vinegar brine and can leave the pickle soft and watery.

Swap the cabbage

The recipe marks cabbage as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, turmeric):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Cauliflowerfits better
  3. Cucumberfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, turmeric. 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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