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Pickled Cabbage

Pickled cabbage made by shredding cabbage, salting, adding spices, and heating vinegar with alum.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Pickled Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shred the heads of red cabbage and place them in a jar.

  2. Sprinkle coarse sea salt through the cabbage and let it stand overnight.

  3. In the morning, rinse and drain the cabbage thoroughly.

  4. Return the cabbage to the jar.

Pickle

  1. Place the cloves, cinnamon, and pepper in a spice bag and add to the vinegar.

  2. Add the pulverized alum to the vinegar before pouring.

  3. Heat the vinegar and pour it over the cabbage while hot.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  4. Cinnamon + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Cabbage + cinnamontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together336 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Red cabbage
The main vegetable, which becomes crisp and tangy as it pickles.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cabbage, firming its texture before pickling.
Vinegar
Provides the sour acidity that makes the cabbage a pickle and helps preserve it.
Alum
Helps keep the cabbage pieces firm and crisp during pickling.
Cloves
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the vinegar.
Cinnamon
Adds sweet, warm aroma to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Rinse and drain the cabbage thoroughly. Salt draws water out of the cabbage by osmosis. Rinsing removes the surface salt so the finished pickle is not overly salty, and draining removes excess liquid so the vinegar stays strong and the cabbage stays crisp.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, cinnamon, pepper, 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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