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Pickled Cabbage
Chop sufficient cabbage to make one gallon, add one good-sized onion chopped, two red and two green peppers cut in small strips. (The onion may be omitted if not liked.) Put one layer of this in the bottom of a stone jar, sprinkle over one teaspoonful of salt, then one of cabbage, one of salt, and so continue until the cabbage is used. Cover and stand away over night. Next day drain thoroughly in a colander, pressing lightly; then put a layer of the cabbage in the bottom of a jar, sprinkle over a few mustard seeds, one or two whole cloves, then a layer of cabbage, dust with pepper; again a layer of mustard seed and one or two cloves, and so continue until the jar is nearly full. Do not pack tightly. Cover with good cider vinegar, waiting until it sinks to the bottom of the jar; then cover again until the cabbage is thoroughly moistened with vinegar. It is ready for immediate use and will keep seven or eight days.
This is a short-keep vinegar pickle, not a fermented kraut and not a canned preserve. The overnight salting is what makes it work, and the seven-to-eight-day limit in the original is a real limit, not modesty.
- Refrigerate itThe recipe assumes a cool cellar or pantry. Keep the finished jar in the refrigerator and treat the stated seven or eight days as the outside edge. Nothing here is processed or sealed, so it is a fresh pickle in the same category as a jar of quick cucumbers.
- QuantityOne gallon of chopped cabbage is roughly 3 to 4 lb of trimmed head, so one large head or two medium. After the overnight salting and draining it will pack down well below its original gallon volume.
- The salt is deliberately vagueA teaspoon per layer, with layers of no stated thickness, works out to something like 3 to 4 tablespoons total for a gallon. Use coarse pickling or kosher salt; iodised table salt can cloud the brine and darken the cabbage.
- Drain hardThe overnight salting pulls a surprising amount of water out. If you press only lightly, as instructed, expect the cabbage to keep weeping and dilute the vinegar. Press firmly enough that no more liquid runs, or the pickle turns thin and slack within days.
- Stone jarA glazed stoneware crock. Any glass, glazed ceramic or food-grade plastic vessel does the same job. Avoid bare metal and older decorative glazes of unknown origin, since vinegar leaches.
- The peppers"Two red and two green peppers" is ambiguous: period American recipes may mean sweet peppers or milder pod peppers. Use mild peppers unless you want heat.
- Vinegar"Good cider vinegar" means full strength and unwatered. Use modern cider vinegar at its standard 5 percent acidity, do not dilute it, and do not substitute a low-acid salad vinegar. The acid is doing most of the preserving here.
- Topping upThe instruction to wait for the vinegar to sink and then add more is the important one. Air pockets in a loosely packed jar are where surface yeast and mould start. Keep the cabbage fully submerged, and use a small weight or a folded cabbage leaf to hold it down.
- Whole spicesYellow or brown mustard seed and whole cloves both stay whole. Cloves are strong; one or two per layer is genuinely enough, and a heavy hand turns the whole jar medicinal.
Vinegar cabbage of this kind sits between two older traditions: German-American sauerkraut, which is salt-fermented over weeks, and the English pickle jar, which relies on vinegar alone. For small household batches the vinegar route needed no fermentation to watch and no cellar to keep it in. Recipes like this one are contemporaneous with chow-chow and with the pepper-and-cabbage relishes still sold in the South. The frank admission that the pickle keeps only a week or so marks it as an everyday table condiment rather than a winter store.