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White Cabbage, to Pickle
Take a firm white cabbage; remove the outer leaves, and sprinkle salt upon it, and leave it for a couple of hours. Wash it in cold water, drain it, and cut it into very thin shreds. Make some brine sufficiently strong to float an egg, pour this when cold over the shredded vegetable, and leave it for a fortnight. Stir every day. Boil for five minutes as much vinegar as will entirely cover the cabbage, with spices in the proportion of a quarter of an ounce of old ginger, a quarter of an ounce of black pepper, a quarter of an ounce of long pepper, a quarter of an ounce of cloves, a quarter of an ounce of turmeric mixed smoothly with a little cold vinegar, a tea-spoonful of mustard-seed, and a piece of alum the size of a pea to each pint of vinegar. A clove of garlic may be added if liked. Skim the vinegar, and pour it hot over the cabbage. Let it remain three days. Drain off the vinegar, boil it, and again pour it whilst hot over the cabbage. Put the cabbage into bottles or unglazed jars, divide the spices equally amongst these, and cover the pickle entirely with the vinegar. Add more vinegar (which has been boiled and allowed to get cold) as required.
A long-brine vinegar pickle in the Victorian manner: two weeks in salt, then two hot vinegar pours. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the measurements and materials need translating before you start.
- Brine "strong enough to float an egg"That test indicates a heavy brine, roughly 10 per cent salt or more \` in practse about a cup of coarse kosher salt (considerably less if using fine pickling salt, which is much denser) dissolved in 1 quart of water, cooled before use. The egg test is the original's only measure, so treat any conversion as approximate and check with an egg as they did.
- Use non-iodised saltTable salt with iodine and anti-caking agents will cloud the brine and can dull the cabbage. Pickling, canning or plain kosher salt is what this recipe assumes.
- Quarter of an ounceAbout 7 g of each spice, and the proportions are given per pint of vinegar — scale the whole spice list up with the vinegar, not just the alum.
- Long pepperPiper longum, a catkin-shaped relative of black pepper that appears in British pickle spice lists into the nineteenth century and is now a specialist purchase. If you cannot find it, more black pepper plus a few allspice berries gives a closer effect than leaving it out.
- AlumPickling alum (potassium aluminium sulphate) was the traditional crisping agent and is still sold, but modern preserving guidance has abandoned it: it does little that a good brine does not, and larger amounts taste astringent and can upset the stomach. The pea-sized piece specified is small, and the pickle is perfectly good without it.
- "Unglazed jars"The concern was most likely reactive or lead-glazed earthenware in contact with hot vinegar. Use glass jars with plastic-lined or non-metallic lids; a bare metal lid will corrode.
- Vinegar strength and storageUse a vinegar labelled 5 per cent acidity — malt or cider vinegar both suit the spicing. This is a crock-style pickle, not a processed preserve: keep the cabbage fully submerged and store it in the refrigerator rather than treating the sealed jars as shelf-stable.
- The fortnight in brineStir daily as instructed and skim any scum that forms. This is the step that draws out water and sets the texture; cutting it short leaves the shreds limp once the hot vinegar hits them.
- Yield and timingOne large firm cabbage gives roughly 2 lb of shreds and fills two to three pint jars. Allow about three weeks from start to finish, and another two or three weeks in the jar before the spicing settles.
Cassell's places this among the household pickles put up in autumn, when cabbages were cheap and firm \` the same tradition that produced piccalilli, walnut ketchup and pickled red cabbage. The spice list draws on the British colonial spice trade: turmeric for colour, long pepper and old ginger for heat, cloves and mustard seed for pungency, with the yellow-stained result closer to an Anglo-Indian achar than to German sauerkraut, which relies on lactic fermentation rather than vinegar. Alum's presence is a period marker; it appears in pickle recipes through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a firming agent and largely disappeared from domestic guidance in the twentieth. The instruction to use unglazed jars probably reflects Victorian concern about lead leaching from cheap glazed earthenware under the action of hot vinegar.