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Pickled Cabbage
1 Cabbage, Quartered Spiced Vinegar Salt Remove outer leaves before quartering and reject stalks; put in jar, sprinkle salt between layers and let stand overnight. Drain dry as possible and cover with boiling hot vinegar spiced to the taste.
A bare-bones instruction of the kind written for cooks who already knew what "spiced vinegar" meant. The two things it leaves out are the vinegar's strength and how the finished jar is to be kept.
- Treat it as a refrigerator pickleThere is no sealing, boiling-water processing or headspace given here, so nothing about the method makes the jar shelf-stable. Cool it, cap it and keep it in the refrigerator, where it will hold a month or two; for a pantry pickle use a current tested recipe with measured acidity and processing times.
- Vinegar strength mattersUse commercial cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity, undiluted. Home vinegars and "drinking" vinegars of unknown strength are the one substitution that undermines the whole preservation.
- What "spiced to the taste" meantSpiced vinegar was mixed to no fixed formula, but a common combination for a quart of vinegar is roughly a tablespoon each of mustard seed and whole black peppercorns, a teaspoon of whole cloves, a few blades of mace or a cinnamon stick, and often a sliced onion. Simmer the spices in the vinegar 10 minutes and strain; ground spices will cloud the jar and turn the cabbage muddy.
- The salting is not optionalThe overnight salt draws out water that would otherwise dilute the vinegar and soften the cabbage. Use about 2 tablespoons of coarse salt per 2 lb cabbage, sprinkled between the layers, and drain thoroughly. Do not rinse under running water unless the result tastes too salty to you.
- Which cabbageThe recipe does not say; red cabbage is the usual choice in the English pickling tradition and holds its colour well, while white or Savoy tends to go limp faster. Note that the original packs the cabbage in quarters; slicing or shredding the drained quarters will pickle more evenly, but that is a departure from the text.
- Non-reactive vessels onlyHot vinegar pulls metal out of aluminium, copper and unlined iron, giving a grey cabbage and a metallic taste. Use stainless or enamel to heat the vinegar and glass to store it.
- Yield and waitingThe recipe gives no yield; one average cabbage will fill a couple of pint jars. It is edible the next day, though the spice takes several days to settle in.
Spiced-vinegar cabbage belongs to the long English tradition of "pickled red cabbage," a cold-weather relish eaten with cold meat, sausage and cheese, and it appears in American cookbooks as well. Salting overnight, draining, then covering with boiling spiced vinegar is the same three-step formula printed for well over a century before this book appeared, which is why the author felt no need to explain it. Its place in a bride's cook book is telling: a chapter of pickles was, by tradition at least, part of what a new household was expected to manage, since a jar of something sharp was what made a plate of plain boiled or cold meat interesting.