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Pickled Red Cabbage
1 teaspoonful red pepper I quart (4 cups) vinegar I large red cabbage Salt Bring the vinegar to the boiling point and cool it; stir the red pepper into it. Quarter the cabbage, remove the stalk, pull the leaves apart, and wash it thoroughly.
Cut the leaves into thin shreds, arrange them on an earthenware dish, sprinkle a handful of salt over them, and allow to stand in a cool place for twelve hours. Drain the cabbage, dry it in a cloth, and pack it in stoneware jars. Fill the jars with the vinegar so that the pickle is well covered, and tie down.
A cold-vinegar pickle of the British type, meant to be eaten as a relish with cold meat rather than processed for the shelf. The salting step is the one that decides whether it stays crisp.
- The hinge: dry-salt then dryTwelve hours under salt pulls out the water that would otherwise dilute the vinegar and turn the shreds limp. Drain well and press dry in a cloth; wet cabbage gives a slack, cloudy pickle.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity — ordinary distilled white, cider, or malt. The recipe only takes it to the boil, so little volume is lost, but measure the 4 cups before heating and top up the jars if needed.
- "Red pepper"In books of this period this means ground cayenne, not paprika and not sweet pepper. One teaspoon in a quart is warm but not fierce; many versions of this pickle add a few peppercorns, a blade of mace or a bay leaf to the vinegar as it heats.
- How much salt"A handful" is roughly 1/4 cup of coarse salt for one large cabbage. Use kosher or pickling salt — iodised table salt can darken the pickle and any anti-caking agent will cloud the vinegar.
- VesselsEarthenware and stoneware were the standard vinegar-safe vessels of the period, and neither reacts with acid. Glass or food-grade plastic is fine; avoid aluminium, copper and bare cast iron at every stage.
- "Tie down"Originally a round of waxed paper or a cloth secured with string — a cover, not a seal. This is not a heat-processed canning recipe and should not be treated as one. Use plastic or plastic-lined lids and keep the jars in the refrigerator or a genuinely cold larder.
- Yield and timingOne large red cabbage shreds down to roughly 2 quarts packed, which may need more than the quart of vinegar specified to cover. It is edible after a day, better after a week, and loses crunch over a few months.
- ColourRed cabbage pigment turns blue-grey in alkaline conditions and bright magenta in acid, so the vinegar is what keeps the colour looking right.
Pickled red cabbage is a fixture of British household cookery, where it sat on the table beside cold beef, brawn, pork pie and bread and cheese; recipes of this exact shape — salt overnight, cover with spiced cold vinegar, tie down — run through nineteenth-century manuals with very little variation. The cold-vinegar method distinguishes it from cooked German-style Rotkohl: nothing is stewed, so the leaves stay crisp and the acid does the preserving.