Home › Preserving › Red Cabbage Pickle
Red Cabbage Pickle
Select small hard heads of red cabbage; remove the outer imperfect leaves, cut in quarters, and remove the hard centers. Lay the quarters of cabbage in a stoneware jar, in layers, sprinkling each layer with salt. Let stand twentyfour hours. Drain off the brine, cover with cold water, and let stand twelve hours. Drain off the water and measure it. Pack the cabbage in a clean, dry jar, sprinkling in whole cloves, blades of mace, white mustard seed, chili peppers, and coriander seed. Scald as much vinegar as water poured off; pour this hot over the cabbage, cover, and store in a cool place.
The cabbage will be ready for use in a month.
White cabbage may be prepared in the same way. Half a cup or more of sugar may be scalded with the vinegar if desired.
A cold-packed vinegar pickle rather than a canned preserve — nothing is boiled in the jar, so the acid and the cool storage are doing all the work. That makes vinegar strength and storage temperature the two things worth getting right.
- Acid keeps the colourRed cabbage owes its colour to anthocyanins, which turn violet or blue-grey in anything alkaline and hold a clear red in acid. Use full-strength vinegar, undiluted, and keep the cabbage submerged; the pink you want is a chemical result, not a cosmetic one.
- Vinegar strengthBuy vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity, the standard for pickling. Period vinegars varied and some artisanal or homemade vinegars today run weaker, which is the one substitution that undermines the whole method.
- The salt is unmeasured"Sprinkling each layer with salt" is a dry-salting step to draw out water, not a preserving cure. A tablespoon or two of coarse salt per pound of trimmed cabbage is a reasonable starting point; use pickling or kosher salt, since the additives in ordinary iodised table salt can cloud the brine.
- "Measure it" means the water, not the brineThe volume you measure is the plain cold water drained off after the twelve-hour soak, and you scald an equal volume of vinegar to replace it. The first day's salt brine is simply discarded.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed; whole "blades" are sold by spice merchants but ground mace is far more common. Quoted equivalents vary, but a small pinch to half a teaspoon of ground mace will stand in for a blade, though it will haze the vinegar. A teaspoon each of whole cloves, mustard seed and coriander per quart is a sensible starting point.
- VesselsThe "stoneware jar" is a crock. Any non-reactive container works — glass or glazed stoneware — but never aluminium, copper or bare cast iron, which react with vinegar and will taint the pickle and turn the cabbage a dull grey.
- StorageA "cool place" in a period household meant a cellar or larder, appreciably colder than a modern kitchen. Without a sealed, heat-processed jar, store this in the refrigerator and treat it as a keeping pickle of a few months, not a shelf-stable canned good. Discard it if the liquid goes cloudy, ropy or smells yeasty.
- Yield and useTwo or three small heads will fill a jar or two, depending on size. It is a condiment rather than a vegetable dish — a spoonful alongside cold roast meat, sausage, or cheese — and the recipe's month of standing is there to let the spices work into the cabbage.
Pickled red cabbage is one of the more stubbornly unchanged items in the English larder, appearing in printed cookery books well before the nineteenth century and still sold in jars in British supermarkets today. Its logic is seasonal: hard winter cabbages keep well in the raw, but they keep better still in vinegar, and a household that had put up fruit in sugar all summer turned to vegetables in vinegar as autumn closed. The presence of mace, cloves and coriander places it with the older, heavily spiced English pickles rather than the plainer dill-and-garlic tradition of central and eastern Europe. The closing note that white cabbage may be treated the same way suggests that the red was chosen at least partly for its colour.