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Chow Chow

A pickled relish of green tomatoes, onions, peppers, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 tomatoes, onions, and green peppers finely.

  2. Mix the chopped vegetables with the coarse sea salt and let them stand overnight.

  3. Squeeze the mixture through a cloth to remove all moisture.

Season and pack

  1. Add allspice, cloves, black pepper, horseradish, and white mustard seed to the mixture and mix well.

  2. Pack the mixture into a jar and cover it 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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Allspice + horseradishtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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 its tart, fresh body.
Onions
Add savoury sharpness and aroma as they soften in the brine and vinegar.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the chopped vegetables, which is then squeezed away to firm the mixture.
White mustard seed
Adds pungent heat and a sharp, mustardy flavour to the relish.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves the mixture and gives it its tangy flavour.

The step that matters

Squeezing out the moisture. Salt draws water out of the chopped vegetables overnight. Squeezing out as much of that liquid as possible keeps the relish firm and stops it from becoming watery in the jar.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Radishfits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, pepper, allspice, clove, horseradish, mustard, 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.

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