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Pickled White Cabbage
Take four large cabbages and remove all tough portions and the stalks, cut them into slices, put them in an earthen jar or wooden tub, sprinkle over a half pint of salt and allow it to stand over night. The next day draw off the brine, put the cabbage over the fire, with four peeled and chopped onions, four ounces of mustard seed, two ounces each of ground mustard-seed, celery-seed and turmeric, one ounce each of whole mace, cloves, allspice and pepper, two pounds of brown sugar and enough vinegar to cover the whole. Boil well until the stalks of the cabbage are tender, then cool and pickle, keeping in air-tight jars.
A large-batch English-style mustard pickle scaled for a hotel larder. The quantities are enormous by domestic standards, and the storage instruction is the one part that has not aged well.
- Scale it downFour large cabbages, salted and cooked down, will fill several gallons of jars. A quarter of the recipe — one cabbage, one onion, 1/4 cup salt, 1 oz mustard seed and roughly 1/2 lb brown sugar — is a realistic household batch.
- Half a pint of saltThat is one cup by volume, used as a dry cure to draw water out of the cabbage overnight. Use coarse pickling or kosher salt; iodised table salt clouds the brine and is heavier per cup.
- Spices by weightFour ounces of mustard seed is about 3/4 cup; two ounces of ground turmeric is a scant half cup, which is what gives the pickle its bright yellow. The ounce each of whole mace, cloves, allspice and pepper is best tied into muslin so the whole spices can be lifted out before jarring.
- "Ground mustard-seed"This means dry mustard powder, distinct from the whole seed listed just before it. Both are wanted: the seed for texture, the powder for heat and to thicken the liquor slightly.
- Vinegar strengthUse a standard 5 percent cider or distilled vinegar, enough to just cover. Cabbage releases a good deal of water as it cooks, so err on the side of less liquid at the start rather than a thin, diluted pickle at the end.
- How long to boil"Until the stalks are tender" is roughly 15 to 25 minutes at a gentle boil for sliced cabbage. Longer and the whole batch collapses into a soft, dull-coloured mash; the sliced ribs should still have some resistance.
- "Cool and pickle"An old formula meaning let the mixture come off the boil, then pack it with its liquor into jars; the recipe's only storage direction is to keep it in air-tight jars.
- Storage, updatedSealing jars straight from the kettle in this way is no longer considered sound, particularly here where the vinegar is unmeasured and will be diluted to an unknown degree by the cabbage's own water. Pack it into clean jars, keep it in the refrigerator, and use it within a month or two; for shelf-stable jars follow a current tested pickling recipe with a specified vinegar-to-vegetable ratio and a water-bath processing time.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's kitchen into print in 1896, was cataloguing the working repertoire of a large American hotel, and that repertoire included a substantial English pickling tradition. Turmeric, mustard seed and mustard powder together are the signature of the yellow pickles the English called piccalilli and Americans often called chow-chow — sharp, sweet, resolutely bright, and made in quantity in autumn when cabbage was cheap. Pickles of this sort were not a condiment afterthought in the period: a hotel sideboard or a household relish tray was expected to carry several, and they did real work alongside cold roast meats and boiled dinners through the winter. The overnight salting before cooking is the older and more important half of the method, drawing enough water from the cabbage that the vinegar has some chance of keeping it.