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Cabbage Pickle
Chop cabbage and onions moderately fine, sprinkle with salt and let it stand over night in a crock; then drain through a colander thoroughly; put in your jar a layer of this, sprinkle with white mustard seed, and so on till all is used. Pour over it cold vinegar. Two good onions to a head of cabbage is sufficient. This pickle keeps well.
A fresh-pack sour pickle with no cooking at all, which means the salt draw and the vinegar are doing all the work. The proportions are left to the cook, so a few numbers are worth fixing before you start.
- The hinge: drain it dryWhatever water is left in the cabbage dilutes the vinegar, and dilute vinegar is what turns a crock of pickle soft and cloudy. After the overnight salting, drain in a colander and then press the cabbage firmly, or wring it in a clean towel, until no more brine runs.
- Salt quantityThe recipe gives none. For salting-down purposes, figure roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons of pickling or kosher salt per pound of chopped cabbage and onion, tossed through and left in a non-reactive bowl overnight. Use pickling or kosher salt rather than ordinary table salt, whose additives can cloud the brine.
- Vinegar strengthBuy cider or white vinegar labeled 5 percent acidity and use it undiluted. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied wildly, which is part of why old pickle recipes are vague; modern bottled vinegar is standardized and there is no reason to cut it.
- ScaleA medium head of cabbage runs 2 to 2.5 lb and yields somewhere around 1.5 quarts of chopped pickle after salting and draining. Two onions per head, as written, is roughly 12 oz. Expect to need about 3 to 4 cups of vinegar to cover.
- White mustard seedThis is ordinary yellow mustard seed, still sold under both names. About a tablespoon per quart layer is right; it flavors the pickle and its oils help keep the brine clean.
- The crock and the jarBoth must be non-reactive: stoneware, glass, or food-grade plastic. Aluminum and bare cast iron will react with the salt and vinegar and darken the cabbage.
- Storage, which is where old and new part company"Keeps well" in a book like this presumably assumed a cool cellar and a covered crock. Since there is no boiling water process here and no measured brine, treat it as a refrigerator pickle: keep it cold, fully submerged under vinegar, and eat it within two or three months.
- When to eat itIt is edible after two days and better after a week, once the mustard seed has bloomed and the cabbage has gone from raw to sharp. Because nothing is ever heated it starts out crisp, though it will soften gradually over weeks in the jar.
Chopped cabbage under cold vinegar is the plainest member of a family of American "cold pickles" that fills the pickle chapters of older compilations alongside chow-chow, piccalilli and pepper hash — all of them ways of turning a late-autumn cabbage crop into something that would last past the first frost. The overnight salting is the old technique of drawing water out of a vegetable before pickling, a step often compared to the salting that precedes sauerkraut and German-American krautsalat, though in sauerkraut the drawn liquid is kept as the fermenting brine rather than drained off; the difference is that this recipe stops the fermentation before it begins by flooding the cabbage with acid instead of letting it make its own. The vagueness about salt and vinegar is characteristic of the genre, and the one quantity the printed recipe does fix is the ratio of two onions to a head.