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Pickled Red Cabbage (Large frying pan when hot put)
a large frying pan; when hot put in the slices of cabbage, add one teaspoonful of salt, three tablespoonfuls of vinegar, and one chopped onion. Cover the pan and place over a moderate fire to cook gently one hour. Serve very hot.
If care is taken in the preparation of this dish, it will be delicious.
The page opens mid-sentence — the head of the recipe, which would have named the quantity of cabbage and the fat put into the pan, is missing. What survives is a workable braise, but a few things need filling in.
- The missing first lineA hot frying pan with nothing in it will scorch shredded cabbage in seconds. Some fat — butter, bacon fat or drippings, perhaps two to three tablespoons — was most likely named in the missing head, though the surviving text does not say so.
- How much cabbageUnstated. One medium head of red cabbage, roughly 2 lb, shredded fine, matches the seasoning given — a teaspoon of salt, three tablespoons of vinegar, one onion. That yields four to six servings as a side.
- "A moderate fire"On a modern burner this is low to medium-low, the pan just ticking over under its lid. Anything brisker and the hour of cooking will dry the pan out and catch the sugars in the cabbage.
- The vinegar is structuralAcid is what keeps red cabbage red. Cooked without it the anthocyanins shift blue-grey, and a full hour of heat will do that decisively. Three tablespoons for a whole head is on the modest side; a little more will help the colour, though it will make the dish sharper.
- LiquidThree tablespoons of vinegar and the cabbage's own water are a thin margin for sixty minutes under a lid. Check at twenty-minute intervals and add a splash of water or stock if the pan is dry, or the bottom layer will brown before the top layer softens.
- An hour is not a mistakeThis is deliberately long-cooked cabbage — collapsed, sweet, glossy, nothing like a modern quick sauté. Cooked twelve minutes it will simply be raw-tasting and sharp. The time is the point of the dish.
- The title"Pickled" here means soured with vinegar in the pan, not preserved in a jar. Nothing about this dish keeps; it is meant to go straight to the table, and the instruction to serve it very hot is worth following.
Long-braised red cabbage with vinegar and onion is a dish of the German and Central European kitchen, carried into American and British cookery books through the nineteenth century and standard in them by the time this one was printed. The vinegar fixes the colour, which is the whole visual argument for using red cabbage rather than white. The closing line here, that care in preparation makes the dish delicious, is the argument in miniature.