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Pickled Red Cabbage (Cut hard heads of red cabbage)
Cut hard heads of red cabbage into fine strips, place at once in a stone jar. Add to each layer, a half teaspoonful of salt and about six whole allspice and pepper-corns. Cover with cold vinegar and it is ready for immediate use.
A cold-pack refrigerator pickle with no cooking at all, which makes the details of vessel, vinegar and salt do all the work.
- The hinge: keep it submergedCabbage floats, and any shreds sitting above the vinegar will darken and spoil. Pack the jar tightly, top up with vinegar so everything is covered by half an inch, and weight the surface with a small saucer or a zip-top bag of brine.
- Vinegar strengthUse a standard 5 per cent distilled white or cider vinegar straight from the bottle, undiluted. Wine vinegars and older "pickling vinegars" vary; anything below 5 per cent gives a slack, short-lived pickle.
- The stone jarAn unglazed or antique glazed crock may leach and will not seal. Use glass or food-grade plastic. Avoid any metal bowl, lid or spoon that is not stainless steel, as vinegar attacks aluminium, copper and bare iron and will turn the cabbage a dull grey.
- SaltUse pickling, kosher or plain sea salt; iodised table salt can cloud the vinegar and darken the colour.
- "Ready for immediate use"It is edible at once but tastes mainly of raw cabbage and vinegar. Twenty-four hours in the refrigerator lets the salt draw out water and soften the strips; two or three days is better.
- StorageThis is not a canned preserve. Keep it refrigerated and eat within about a month; it stays crisp for a couple of weeks and gradually goes limp after that.
- SpicesThe recipe's 'about six whole allspice and pepper-corns' per layer is generous by modern taste, and may mean six of each or six in all. Keep them whole so they can be avoided at the table, and add a bay leaf or a few mustard seeds if you want more depth.
Red cabbage keeps its colour in acid — the anthocyanins that make it purple turn a clear bright pink in vinegar and a muddy blue-grey in alkaline or metal-contaminated conditions. Cold-packed vinegar pickles like this one sit at the everyday end of period preserving: no boiling, no sealing, no processing, just a crock in a cool larder to be dipped into over the following weeks, in the way a jar of quick pickle now lives in the refrigerator door. Pickled red cabbage of this kind is long associated with northern European and British tables, where it was eaten as a sharp relish alongside cold meat, sausage and pork.