Home › Vegetables › Fried Cabbage
Fried Cabbage
Shred or chop fine. Have a frying pan at hand with some salt pork gravy, and a small quantity of water, season to taste with salt and pepper.
Cook slowly, keeping well covered. When done serve with or without vinegar.
A plain skillet cabbage of the sort that leaned on the fat left from breakfast. The method is sound; it needs only quantities and a sense of timing.
- QuantityThe original never says how much cabbage. One medium head, about 2 lb, shredded, fills a 12-inch pan and serves four as a side.
- Salt pork gravyThis means the rendered fat and browned drippings left in the pan after frying salt pork, not a thickened sauce. Two to three tablespoons of bacon fat or pork drippings gives the same effect.
- How much water"A small quantity" is unspecified; a quarter cup is enough. The cabbage releases its own moisture under the lid, and more water than that tends to stew it grey instead of concentrating the flavour.
- The covered pan is the pointKeeping it well covered over low heat is what makes this work -- the cabbage steams in fat and its own juice and turns sweet. Lifting the lid to stir repeatedly lets the steam out and stalls the cooking.
- TimingFifteen to twenty minutes over low heat gives tender cabbage with some body. Beyond about half an hour it collapses and the sulphur smell asserts itself.
- SaltSeason lightly at the start and correct at the end. Salt pork drippings carry a good deal of salt already.
- The vinegarA tablespoon of cider vinegar stirred in off the heat, or passed at table, cuts the fat and is worth doing. Add it at the end rather than during cooking, where it toughens the leaves.
Cabbage cooked down in pork fat is a long-standing and widespread dish in American home cookery, found in New England boiled dinners, Pennsylvania German kitchens and Southern tables alike, because it depended on two things many households had: a winter cabbage from the cellar and a crock of salt pork. Collections like this one print such recipes in a few lines. The optional vinegar at the end points to the same sweet-and-sour instinct that produced hot slaw and the various "wilted" salads.