Name: Pepper Mangoes
Ingredients: bell peppers; cabbage, chopped fine; mustard seed; horseradish; celery seed; allspice; wide strips of maslin; cold vinegar

Why it works: Mustard and horseradish 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 ↓

Pepper Mangoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bell peppers by removing the seeds if desired after scalding.
Fill each pepper with chopped cabbage, mustard seed, horseradish, celery seed, and a little allspice.
Tie the peppers with wide strips of maslin.
Drop the filled peppers into cold vinegar.
Place cross sticks over the top of the pickles to keep them submerged in the vinegar.
Store the pickles in the vinegar to keep them well.

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.

Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,832 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,169 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Cabbage + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together481 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Mustard + allspicetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,928 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
Cabbage + mustardtop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,645 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

Swap the allspice

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

Tarragonfits better
Dillfits better
Capersfits better
Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, cabbage, mustard, horseradish, celery, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.