Skip to main content
Main

Pickled Red Cabbage

A pickled cabbage dish made with salt, spices, and cold vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pickled Red Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Remove the outside leaves from the cabbage and cut it in half.

  2. Soak the cabbage halves in salt water for 1 hour.

  3. Drain the cabbage in a colander and shred it finely.

  4. Place the shredded cabbage on a dish with plenty of salt for 3 to 4 hours.

Pickle and seal

  1. Transfer the cabbage to a jar and add allspice, cloves, peppercorns, and salt.

  2. Cover the mixture with cold vinegar and seal the jar tightly.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cabbage + allspicetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together443 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Cabbage + clovetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together933 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  5. Allspice + vinegartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,548 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage
Provides the crisp, fibrous body that holds up after salting and pickling.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cabbage, firming it and seasoning it before pickling.
Cold vinegar
Supplies the acidity that preserves the cabbage and gives it its sharp flavour.

The step that matters

Salting the shredded cabbage. Salt draws water out of the cabbage by osmosis, which firms the texture and lets it take up seasoning. Too little salt or too short a time leaves it limp and under-seasoned.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (allspice, clove, vinegar):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against allspice, clove, vinegar. 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.

You might also like

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