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Spiced Cabbage
Quarter a nice cabbage; put into a saucepan with half a cup of vinegar, a large teaspoonful of sugar, one teaspoonful of whole pepper, and the same of cloves, salt.
Cover very closely and steam slowly until tender.
A short, blunt recipe that suffers from a typesetting stutter — a whole line is repeated, so the sugar and pepper are listed twice. Read it as one large teaspoon sugar, one teaspoon whole peppercorns, one teaspoon whole cloves.
- The hinge: barely any liquidHalf a cup of vinegar for a whole cabbage is not enough to boil in, and that is deliberate — the cabbage steams in its own moisture with the vinegar as seasoning. Keep the lid tight, the heat low, and check every ten minutes that the pan has not gone dry; add a spoonful or two of water rather than more vinegar.
- Use a non-reactive panVinegar plus cloves in bare cast iron or unlined aluminium will pick up a metallic taste and turn red cabbage a dull grey-blue. Stainless steel or enamelled cast iron.
- Bag the whole spicesA teaspoon of whole cloves loose among the leaves means someone bites into one. Tie the peppercorns and cloves in a square of muslin and lift it out before serving.
- Which cabbageThe recipe says only "a nice cabbage." Red cabbage is the traditional partner for vinegar and cloves and holds its shape better; a firm green or Savoy also works. Count on roughly 2 lb.
- TimingQuartered cabbage over low heat runs 25 to 40 minutes depending on density. Test the thickest part of the core with a knife tip; the leaves will overcook long before the core softens, so cutting each quarter into two wedges through the stem shortens things considerably.
- Balance at the endHalf a cup of vinegar with only one teaspoon of sugar is decidedly sharp by modern taste. Taste before serving and add sugar a half-teaspoon at a time; many sweet-sour cabbage recipes use rather more sugar than this against the same quantity of vinegar.
- YieldFour to six as a side dish. Good warm, and better the next day reheated.
Vinegar-and-clove cabbage belongs to the northern European braised red cabbage tradition — German Rotkohl, Dutch rodekool, the Scandinavian Christmas cabbage — which reached American cookbooks through immigrant kitchens. The acid is not only for flavour: it sets the anthocyanin pigment in red cabbage, which is why the traditional versions all include vinegar, apple or lemon, and why cabbage cooked in plain water goes an unappetising blue. Whole cloves and whole peppercorns, rather than ground, mark this as a recipe from an era when spices came home in bulk and were ground as needed; the instruction to "cover very closely and steam slowly" points to gentle, unhurried cooking. Cabbage earned its place in the vegetable repertoire by being cheap and storable through winter in a cellar.