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Chow-chow

A pickled relish made from green and ripe tomatoes, onions, cabbage, peppers, and spices, boiled with vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and mustard 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 ↓

Chow-chow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop the green and ripe tomatoes, onions, cabbage, and peppers.

  2. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and place in a coarse bag. Drain overnight.

Cook and seal

  1. In the morning, place in a porcelain-lined kettle with brown sugar, horseradish, black pepper, mustard, mustard seed, mace, and celery seed.

  2. Cover with vinegar and boil until clear. Seal in jars.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cabbage + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together481 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

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

  5. Onion + mustardtop 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

Green tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the relish and a tart, firm body after salting and draining.
Ripe tomatoes
Add moisture and a softer, sweeter tomato flavour to the mixture.
Cabbage
Adds crisp texture and bulk that holds its shape during cooking.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the acidity of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that preserves the relish and sharpens its flavour.
Horseradish
Adds pungent heat that mellows as the relish cooks.

The step that matters

Draining the salted vegetables overnight. Salt draws water out of the chopped vegetables, so draining them well keeps the relish from becoming watery and helps it hold a firmer texture when boiled in vinegar.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, onion, cabbage, pepper, sugar, horseradish, mustard. 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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