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To Pickle White Axd Red Cabbage

A simple pickled cabbage using vinegar, salt, and spices, with optional colorings for red or white varieties.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and turmeric work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 618 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

To Pickle White Axd Red Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Remove the outside leaves and cut out the stalk of the cabbage.

  2. Shred the cabbage and place it in a colander.

  3. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and let it sit for 24 hours.

  4. Drain the cabbage and pack it into jars.

Pickle and colour

  1. Fill the jars with boiling vinegar and add your choice of spices.

  2. For red cabbage, add a little cochineal powder or a slice of beet-root for color.

  3. For white cabbage, add a little turmeric powder for color.

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 + turmerictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together618 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Cabbage + vinegartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

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

  3. Vinegar + turmerictop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,214 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

Cabbage
Forms the crisp, crunchy body of the pickle that softens slightly as it marinates.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the shredded cabbage, firming it and concentrating its flavour before pickling.
Boiling vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the cabbage and gives the pickle its sharp taste.

The step that matters

Salting for 24 hours. Salt draws water out of the cabbage through osmosis. Too little salt or too short a rest leaves the cabbage limp and watery, so the pickle loses crispness and its brine gets diluted.

Swap the turmeric

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Turmericthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, 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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