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Pickled Red Cabbage
Take three red cabbages, trim them and remove the stalks; cut them into thin slices and lay on a dish and cover with salt, leaving them there for twelve hours; at the expiration of which time wash and salt off the cabbage, draining well, and place in a stone jar, mixing in some thyme, mint and parsley and peppercorns; pour in enough strong white vinegar to cover, place the lid on the jar and let it remain there for four weeks, when it is ready for use.
A straightforward vinegar pickle: dry-salt the cabbage, rinse it, cover it with vinegar and wait. The whole success of it rests on getting the water out first, and on keeping the cabbage under the surface of the vinegar.
- The hinge: draw off the waterThe twelve-hour salting is not seasoning, it is dehydration. Cabbage that goes into the jar still wet dilutes the vinegar and gives limp, cloudy pickle. Layer the sliced cabbage with salt in a colander, then press and drain it thoroughly before rinsing.
- "Wash and salt off"This means rinse the salt away under cold water, then dry the cabbage as well as you can — a salad spinner or a clean towel. The cabbage will already be seasoned from within.
- Vinegar strength"Strong" here presumably means undiluted rather than the watered pickling vinegar sometimes used. Use a distilled white or white wine vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity and do not dilute it; a weaker or diluted vinegar makes for a much less reliable pickle.
- The stone jarA glazed stoneware crock or a glass jar. Nothing reactive — no bare aluminium, copper or unlined steel, which the acid will attack and which will turn the cabbage a dull grey.
- Keep it submergedCabbage floats. Use a small plate, a fermentation weight or a water-filled bag to hold everything below the vinegar line; any shred left in the air will discolour and spoil.
- QuantitiesThree red cabbages is roughly 6-9 lb and needs a large crock; a single 2 lb cabbage scaled down suits most households. Reckon on about a tablespoon of salt per pound of cabbage, a teaspoon of peppercorns per quart, and a small handful of the herbs.
- Storage and timingThe original simply says four weeks in a covered jar, with no temperature given; a cool larder is the likely setting. In a modern kitchen, keep the jar in the refrigerator; it will be crisp and pink after a week and fully mellowed in three to four, and it keeps for a couple of months. This is a fresh-pack pickle, not a canned one -- do not seal it and leave it in a warm cupboard.
- ColourRed cabbage holds its colour in acid and loses it in anything alkaline. The vinegar is what turns the shreds bright magenta rather than blue-grey.
- ServingServe as a relish with cold roast beef, boiled or corned meats and game pie. A tablespoon or two per plate.
Pickled red cabbage is an English kitchen fixture that passed into American cookbooks largely unchanged; nineteenth-century household manuals, Eliza Acton's among them, give closely comparable versions using a salting period and a stone jar, though the details of timing vary from book to book. Its place in a Waldorf book of 1896 is as pantry stock rather than a dish, the sort of relish kept to go out with cold meats and roast joints. The technique is older than the recipe, being simply the standard European way of holding a winter vegetable -- salt to drive out the water, then acid to keep the microbes out -- and it survives on modern tables because the result is genuinely good with fatty meat.