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Cabbage A La Cauliflower
Cut the cabbage very fine, put it in a stewpan, cover with water, and keep closely covered; as soon as tender drain off the water, drop in a small piece of butter, and salt to taste, half cup of cream, or one of milk.
Serve while hot.
A plain boiled-and-creamed cabbage, the "a la cauliflower" referring to the pale, mild, cream-bound result rather than to any cauliflower in the pan. The text as printed contains typesetting repetition, so read it as a single sequence: boil, drain, butter, salt, cream.
- Read through the duplicated linesThe phrases "off the water, drop in a" and "of cream, or one of milk" are repeated compositor errors. The recipe is: drain, add a small piece of butter, salt to taste, and either half a cup of cream or one cup of milk.
- Cut fine means shreddedSlice the head into ribbons no thicker than a coin, as for slaw. Fine shredding is what lets the cabbage cook through quickly enough to stay sweet.
- Don't cover it closelyThe instruction to keep the pan tightly lidded is the one point modern practice has reversed. Trapped sulphur compounds are what give boiled cabbage its cabbagey smell and grey cast; cook uncovered or with the lid ajar.
- TimingNo time is given. Finely shredded cabbage in boiling water is tender in 5 to 8 minutes. Test a strand rather than watching the clock; past ten minutes it slumps and turns sulphurous.
- Cover with waterUse only just enough water to cover, so that draining does not carry off all the sweetness. Drain thoroughly, pressing lightly in the colander, or the cream will be watered down.
- Cream or milkPeriod cream was unstandardised skimmed top-of-the-milk, richer than today's light cream; heavy cream is a workable modern stand-in rather than an exact match. If using the milk option, whole milk, and let it reduce a minute or two over heat so it clings; skim milk will simply pool.
- Butter quantity"A small piece" is about a tablespoon for a medium head. Add it to the hot drained cabbage off the heat so it emulsifies with the cream rather than splitting.
- YieldOne medium head, about 2 lb, serves four as a side dish. A grating of nutmeg or white pepper is entirely in keeping with the style, though the original calls only for salt.
Creamed vegetables were the backbone of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American vegetable cookery, and titles like this one advertised refinement by borrowing the name of a costlier vegetable: cauliflower was a market luxury, cabbage was in every cellar. Dressing cabbage in butter and cream, and shredding it fine so it lost its coarse leafy character, was a way of promoting the cheapest brassica into company food. Household books of this period often instructed cooks to boil cabbage for a very long time, sometimes with a crust of bread or a piece of charcoal in the water to absorb the smell; shorter cooking is a twentieth century correction to precisely that habit. The recipe's brevity is also typical of the genre, which assumed a reader who already knew what a stewpan was and how long to boil a vegetable, and needed only to be told the finishing touches.