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Purple Cabbage Pickle
Chop finely 1 gallon purple cabbage. Add½ cup salt, and then put in stone jar. Over this pour boiling water, cover and let stand until cold. Drain well through a cloth. Again pour over with boiling water and drain as before. Add 1 cup grated horseradish, and over this 2 quarts boiling vinegar to which have been added 2 cups sugar. Cover and let stand until cold.
A fresh-pack vinegar pickle rather than a fermented one — there is no brine cure and no processing, so it belongs in the refrigerator. A few of the quantities and vessels need translating.
- Purple cabbageThis is what a supermarket sells as red cabbage. One gallon of finely chopped cabbage is roughly two medium heads, about 4 to 5 lb before trimming.
- The saltHalf a cup is a lot because most of it is rinsed away in the two boiling-water pourings. Use coarse pickling or kosher salt; the same volume of fine table salt is considerably saltier and often carries anti-caking agents that cloud the liquid.
- Stone jarA glazed stoneware crock. A glass jar, bowl or food-grade plastic bucket does the same job. Avoid antique glazed crocks of unknown origin, which may have lead in the glaze, and avoid aluminium or unlined copper, which react with vinegar.
- The two scaldingsThis is the step that matters. The boiling water wilts the cabbage so it takes up the syrup and drives off the sulphurous edge; draining it thoroughly through cloth each time is what keeps the finished pickle from going watery.
- HorseradishGrate a fresh root; roughly a 4 oz piece gives about a cup. Jarred prepared horseradish is already cut with vinegar, and some styles are creamed, so it will not behave the same way.
- VinegarUse a standard 5 percent acidity cider or white vinegar. Bring it to the boil with the sugar so the sugar dissolves fully, and pour it over hot.
- ColourRed cabbage pigment is a pH indicator. The acid vinegar fixes it bright magenta; hard alkaline tap water in the scalding step can turn it a dull blue-grey.
- Yield and keepingThis makes a large batch: the 2 quarts of pickling liquid alone is 4 pints, with the drained cabbage on top of that. As written, with no sealing or heat processing, this is a refrigerator pickle: pack into clean jars, cover with the liquid, and keep cold. It is ready in a day or two and best inside a couple of months. For a shelf-stable version, follow a current tested canning recipe.
Sweet-sour pickled red cabbage with horseradish belongs to Northern European household cookery — German, Dutch and Scandinavian kitchens all keep versions of it — and similar recipes turn up in Canadian and American Midwestern collections. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, to promote its flour, and like a number of flour-company books of the era it set the baking chapters within a fuller household repertoire, including a section of catsups and pickles. Recipes of this kind assume a cool cellar and a stoneware crock rather than a refrigerator, which is why the instructions stop at “cover and let stand until cold” with no word about sealing or storage.