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Chow-chow

A pickled vegetable mixture of tomatoes, cabbage, peppers, salt, sugar, horseradish, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 481 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chow-chow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

  2. Sprinkle with 1 cup coarse sea salt and let stand overnight.

Season and cover

  1. The next day, strain the mixture.

  2. Add 3 lbs sugar and 1 teacup grated horseradish.

  3. Cover the mixture with vinegar.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Horseradish + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Provide the tart, firm body that gives chow-chow its character.
Ripe tomatoes
Add moisture and a softer, sweeter tomato flavour to the relish.
Cabbage
Adds bulk and crunch that holds its texture in the relish.
Sugar
Sweetens the relish and balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Grated horseradish
Contributes a sharp, pungent heat that gives the relish its bite.

The step that matters

Salting overnight, then straining. Salt draws water out of the chopped vegetables by osmosis. Straining off that liquid before adding sugar and vinegar keeps the relish from becoming watery and diluted.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Radishfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

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

More chow-chow recipes

Tomato 9Relish 8Mustard 6Virginia 5Pickle 4 See all 29 →

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