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Cabbage, Red, Pickled
INGREDIENTS. -Red cabbages, salt, and water; to eaten almost immediately after it is made.
A little bruised cochineal boiled with the vinegar adds much to the appearance of this pickle. Tie down with bladder, and keep in a dry place. the pickle will be much more crisp if the SEASONABLE in July and August , but frost has just touched the leaves.
CABBAGE, RED.
A Victorian vinegar pickle of shredded red cabbage. The surviving text gives the materials and the finishing touches rather than a full set of proportions, so read it as a method sketch and take quantities from a current pickling recipe.
- Proportions not statedThe entry names only red cabbage, salt, water and vinegar, without weights or a vinegar-to-cabbage ratio. Recipes of the period generally salted the shredded cabbage (the mention of salt and water suggests a brine), drained it, then covered it with cold spiced vinegar; the amounts here are not recoverable from the text.
- CochinealCochineal is a red colouring made from dried scale insects, still sold as carmine or E120. It is cosmetic only, used to deepen the red of the pickle; the pickle is no worse without it.
- Bladder covers"Tie down with bladder" means a softened pig's bladder stretched over the jar mouth and tied, the standard airtight seal before screw lids. Use glass jars with vinegar-proof plastic-coated lids instead, since vinegar corrodes bare metal and taints the pickle.
- SaltUse plain pickling or kosher salt. Table salt with anti-caking agents will cloud the brine, and iodised salt can dull the colour.
- Vinegar strengthOrdinary British malt or cider vinegar of 5 per cent acidity is what is wanted. Anything weaker will not preserve the cabbage, and boiling the vinegar with spice or cochineal should be followed by cooling before it goes over the cabbage, or the shreds go limp.
- Crispness and seasonThe entry gives July and August as the season, and the surviving words link crispness to leaves that frost has just touched, though the sentence is broken and the connection cannot be read with certainty. Choose a dense, heavy head and slice it thinly across the grain.
- KeepingRed cabbage pickle softens and fades within a few months, which is why the original says it is best eaten soon after making. Give it a week for the vinegar to penetrate, then use it within about two months.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. As a rough guide, a medium head of about 2 lb, once salted and drained, will fill roughly two 1-pint jars depending on how tightly it is packed.
Pickled red cabbage was one of the cheapest and most common English store pickles of the nineteenth century, eaten with cold meat, bread and cheese, and later inseparable from fried fish and chips. Its appeal was partly visual: the anthocyanin pigments in the leaves turn a vivid magenta in acid, and cooks who wanted still more colour reached for cochineal, then an ordinary grocer's item imported from Mexico and the Canaries. Pig's bladder was the workaday sealing material of the pre-Mason-jar kitchen, soaked pliable, tied over the jar and left to dry taut. Beeton's household books returned repeatedly to pickles of this kind because they used up a glut of a garden vegetable with nothing but salt and vinegar, and required no sugar, no ice and no cellar.