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To Pickle Red Cabbage

A method for pickling red cabbage using coarse sea salt and optional beetroot for color.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and beetroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 377 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

To Pickle Red Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Remove the outer leaves from the cabbage and cut the heart into strips.

  2. Layer the cabbage in a sieve, sprinkling each layer with coarse sea salt. Repeat until all cabbage is used, then let it stand for 24 hours.

Pickle and jar

  1. Squeeze the cabbage and transfer it to a jar.

  2. If desired, add sliced beetroot for color.

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 + beetroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together377 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

Deep red cabbage
Provides the main bulk and the red pigment that gives the pickle its color.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cabbage through osmosis, softening it and concentrating its flavor for pickling.

The step that matters

Squeezing the cabbage after salting. Salt needs time to draw water out of the cabbage, so the leaves soften and become pliable. Squeezing removes the released liquid so the pickle stays crisp and the jar is not left swimming in brine.

“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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