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Celery Pickle

Pickled celery and cabbage with mustard seed, salt, sugar, ginger, vinegar, and turmeric.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and turmeric match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,776 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Celery Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pickle

  1. In a porcelain-lined kettle, combine mustard seed, salt, chopped cabbage, sugar, celery, crushed ginger root, vinegar, and turmeric.

  2. Boil the mixture slowly for 4 to 5 hours until the cabbage and celery are tender.

  3. Avoid boiling the pickle hard at any time.

Jar and seal

  1. Transfer the pickle into jars, ensuring the vinegar covers it well.

  2. Cork the jars 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. Ginger + turmerictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Mustard + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,279 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Mustard + cabbagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,645 recipes

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

  5. Celery + turmerictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

White mustard seed
Provides the sharp, pungent bite that defines the pickle's flavour.
White cabbage
Forms the bulk of the pickle and turns tender during the long, slow simmer.
Vinegar
Acidifies the mixture, adding sourness and helping preserve the pickle.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar and mustard with sweetness.
Celery
Adds its own savoury, vegetal flavour and softens during cooking.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture slowly. Vigorous boiling can break down the cabbage and celery into mush and evaporate vinegar unevenly, so a gentle simmer keeps the texture intact over the 4 to 5 hours.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mustard, sugar, celery, ginger, vinegar, turmeric. 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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