Pickled Red Cabbage Recipe

Some of you asked for the recipe for the Red Cabbage Relish I made the other day. It's actually called Pickled Red Cabbage and comes from a cookbook I've had for years called All About Pickling by Ortho (yeah, the chemical people but they did a good cookbook!). I like this cookbook because it's arranged alphabetically by vegetable and the directions are easy to follow. There is a misprint in a couple lines of this recipe but it was still pretty easy to figure out what they meant. I made one minor change in the recipe, noted below. My copy of this book is falling apart and stained because I have used it a lot over the years. Maybe time for a new one? Several are available on Amazon.

 Pickled Red Cabbage

2 small red cabbages (I had 6, used them all, so I adjusted the rest of the ingredients accordingly)
1/2 cup coarse salt
1 quart cider vinegar
3 whole cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 bay leaves
    2 tablespoons pickling spice
    2 tablespoons sugar

1. Quarter, core and shred the cabbages (I chopped them finely with a knife; my kraut cutter didn't want to cut these very hardheaded cabbages!)
2. Mix cabbage and salt in a bowl and refrigerate 2 days.
3. Drain the cabbage, squeezing it as dry as possible; Pack into hot sterilized jars.
4. Boil the remaining ingredients. Adjustment: I put the cloves and pickling spice into a bag because I think the cloves can turn pickles dark. Here is also where the recipe is misprinted in my copy--the lines are mixed up or there's something missing. What I did was to boil the ingredients for about 10 minutes so the spice flavoringss got into the brine nicely, then removed the bag. Then I ladled the brine over the cabbage in the jars, making sure to cover the cabbage completely with the brine. (Isn't it interesting how the color changes when the brine is added? Check this site to make red cabbage turn green!)

5. Seal and process 20 minutes in boiling water bath.

That's it! Pretty simple, really. and tasty!


Copyright 2012 Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.