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Preserve

Yellow Pickles

A pickle of salted cabbage, onions and red peppers, steeped in vinegar and seasoned with mustard, sugar, horseradish and turmeric.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Yellow Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Combine cabbage and onions in a bowl, sprinkle with salt, and let stand for 12 hours.

  2. Add chopped red peppers and pour weak vinegar over the mixture. Let it stand for 24 hours.

  3. Squeeze out excess liquid and transfer to a jar.

Season and pickle

  1. Mix in brown sugar, white mustard seed, celery seed, ground mustard, horseradish, and turmeric.

  2. Place the turmeric in a thin bag on top of the mixture in the jar.

  3. Pour cold strong cider vinegar over the chow-chow and stir for a few days.

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

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

  5. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 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

Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the relish, giving crunch that holds up through the long pickling.
White onions
Add sharpness and aroma that mellow during the salt and vinegar rest.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cabbage and onions, firming them and concentrating flavour.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and depth that balances the vinegar's acidity.
White mustard seed
Provides the pungent mustard bite and texture of the pickle.
Cider vinegar
Supplies the acidity that preserves the pickle and gives it tang.

The step that matters

Squeezing out excess liquid. Removing water after the salt and vinegar rest keeps the chow-chow crisp and stops it from thinning or spoiling in the jar.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Broccolifits better
  2. Radishfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

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