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Cabbage, Red, Pickled
The cabbage should not be cut until it has been slightly frost-bitten. Choose a firm, hard cabbage. Remove the outer leaves, and cut it as finely as possible in cross slices. The finer it is cat the nicer will be the pickle. Put it in a large shallow dish with a layer of salt spread over it, and let it remain for twenty-four hours; then squeeze the purple juice thoroughly from it, and place it in pickle-jars, strewing between every handful a little black pepper and bruised ginger. Fill the jars with cold vinegar, or better still, vinegar which has been boiled and allowed to become cold, and cork securely. It is ready for use at once. The French vinegar is the best for pickling. Probable cost of a good-sized red cabbage, 4d. to 6d.
A cold-vinegar pickle of the simplest kind, and the instructions still work. The one thing to get right is the salting: the cabbage must be drained hard before it meets the vinegar, or the pickle turns thin and cloudy within days.
- The hinge: squeeze it dryTwenty-four hours under salt draws out a great deal of purple liquid, and every drop left behind dilutes the vinegar and shortens the keeping. Press the shreds firmly in a colander, or wring them in a clean cloth, before packing.
- Salt quantityThe original gives none. About 2 tablespoons of coarse salt per pound of shredded cabbage, tossed through rather than laid on in a single layer, salts evenly in a modern bowl. Use plain salt without anti-caking agents, which cloud the brine.
- "The finer it is cat"A printer's error for "cut". The point holds: slice across the head as thinly as you can manage, 2-3 mm, on a mandoline or with a long knife.
- Frost-bitten cabbageField-grown brassicas cut after the first frosts are firmer and sweeter, since cold converts some starch to sugar. Supermarket red cabbage is grown and stored to no such schedule; choose the heaviest, tightest head you can find and accept that this instruction no longer applies.
- VinegarUse a vinegar labelled 5 per cent acidity; cider or malt both suit red cabbage. The recipe prefers vinegar boiled and then cooled before it is poured on, though it does not say why. "French vinegar" most likely meant wine vinegar, which is milder and gives a rounder pickle.
- SpicesRoughly 1 teaspoon of black peppercorns and a bruised piece of ginger per quart jar; "bruised ginger" in this period usually means dried whole root, though fresh will also serve. Whole spice is right here; ground pepper and ground ginger will make the vinegar muddy.
- Jars and closuresCork was the ordinary closure of the period, and it has the incidental advantage that vinegar corrodes bare metal. Use glass jars with plastic-lined or coated lids, never uncoated tinplate, and keep the pickle in the refrigerator. This is a fresh pickle, not a heat-processed preserve.
- Timing and yield"Ready for use at once" is true of the texture, but the flavour is better after a week and the colour holds for a month or two refrigerated. A good-sized head, once trimmed, salted and squeezed, will fill roughly one quart jar, perhaps more depending on how loosely it is packed.
Pickled red cabbage was one of the cheapest pickles in the Victorian larder, and the price note of fourpence to sixpence a head places it firmly among the everyday household stores rather than the luxuries. It was eaten with cold meat, brawn and pork, its acidity doing the work that a sauce would otherwise do. The insistence on frost-bitten cabbage reflects a kitchen tied to the growing season: red cabbage was a late autumn and winter crop, harvested after the first cold nights and pickled to carry the household through to spring. Red cabbage also behaves as a crude acid indicator, its anthocyanin pigments turning bright pink in vinegar and dull blue-grey in alkaline conditions.