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Quick Cabbage Chow-chow

A quick pickled cabbage dish with peppers, onions, mustard seeds, sugar, vinegar, and alum.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Quick Cabbage Chow-chow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop the cabbage, green peppers, and onions very finely.

  2. Mix the chopped vegetables with salt and let them stand for 1 hour.

  3. Drain the mixture for 3 hours.

Make the syrup and pour

  1. In a kettle, combine the brown sugar, celery seed, black mustard seed, and white mustard seed.

  2. Add the vinegar and alum, and bring to a boil.

  3. Pour the hot mixture over the drained vegetables and cover 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. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

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

  4. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  5. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 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

White cabbage
Forms the bulk of the relish and provides its crisp, fibrous texture.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and body, balancing the sharpness of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the relish and gives it its tang.
Black mustard seed
Contributes pungent, sharp flavor when suspended in the hot syrup.
White mustard seed
Adds milder mustard flavor and a bit of bite to the relish.
Alum
Helps firm the vegetables so they stay crisp rather than going soft.

The step that matters

Draining the salted vegetables. Salt draws water out of the chopped vegetables. Draining long enough removes that liquid so the relish stays crisp and the pickling syrup is not diluted.

Swap the onion

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

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

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