Name: Chow Chow
Ingredients: 8 pounds white cabbage; 8 pounds sugar; 1 cup grated horseradish; 4 green peppers, finely chopped; 1 tablespoon salt; 1 small piece of alum; vinegar, enough to cover; 1 pound mustard seed

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

Cut the cabbage into small pieces until you have 8 pounds.

Layer and pack

In a large jar, layer the cabbage, sugar, green pepper, horseradish, and salt.
Repeat the layers until the jar is full.
Add the piece of alum and cover everything with vinegar.
Finally, add the mustard seed on top.

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.

Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,832 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together481 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Cabbage + mustardtop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,645 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,081 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14,067 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

White cabbage: Forms the bulk of the relish and gives it a crisp, sturdy texture.
Sugar: Adds sweetness that balances the sharp vinegar and pickling heat.
Vinegar: Acidifies the mixture, preserving it and giving the relish its tang.
Mustard seed: Contributes a sharp, pungent flavour as the relish matures.
Horseradish: Adds a pungent, sharp heat that lingers in the finished relish.

Swap the cabbage

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

Radishfits better
Beetrootfits better
Shallotfits about as well
Cabbagethe original

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