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To Boil Cabbage with Bacon
Cut a head of hard white cabbage into quarters, pick well, put in salted water two or three hours. About an hour before dinner, drain the cabbage and put in a pot in which a pound and a quarter of bacon has been boiling; a little red pepper is an improvement.
A Southern boiled-dinner method in which the cabbage is cooked in the liquor of a piece of boiled bacon. The recipe assumes you already know how long the bacon needs, which is the one thing it does not say.
- The bacon is not breakfast baconA pound and a quarter of "bacon" here means a slab of cured, unsliced side meat or streaky pork, closer to what is sold now as salt pork, slab bacon or a smoked hock. It needs 1 to 1.5 hours at a bare simmer before the cabbage goes in; thin sliced rashers will simply disintegrate.
- Why the cabbage soaksThe two or three hours in salted water is an insect purge, standard practice when cabbages came from the garden rather than a cold chain. With supermarket cabbage a 20-minute soak, or simply a good rinse between the leaves, does the job. Skip it entirely if you dislike the softening effect.
- The duplicated lineThe text runs "put in salted water two or three hours. About an hour before dinner, drain the cabbage two or three hours . About an hour before dinner, drain the cabbage and put in a pot..." The phrase is plainly doubled in error, whether in typesetting or transcription. There is only one draining.
- Cooking timeAn hour before dinner is generous by modern taste. Quartered cabbage in simmering pot liquor is done in 20 to 30 minutes; longer gives the soft, sulphurous texture the period preferred, so judge by how you want it rather than by the clock.
- SaltThe cured pork will have made the liquor salty on its own, and the cabbage carries a little salt from its soak. Taste the bacon liquor before adding anything, and if it is fierce, dilute it with fresh water rather than seasoning the cabbage separately.
- The red pepper"A little red pepper" means dried cayenne or crushed hot pepper, not paprika or sweet peppers. A pinch in the pot, or a splash of pepper vinegar at the table, is the traditional reading.
- YieldA large head with the meat serves four to six as a main course. Serve the bacon sliced over the cabbage with the pot liquor spooned around, and cornbread to take up the liquid.
Boiled greens cooked in the water of a piece of cured pork is one of the oldest continuous habits in American home cooking, carried into print by compilations like this one. The pork does double duty: it is the meat of the meal and it is the seasoning, since the fat and salt leaching into the water is the whole point of the technique, and the liquid itself is what cooks called pot likker. Cabbage earned its place in these books because it kept: a firm winter head stored in a cellar or buried in straw lasted into spring when little else green did, which is why nineteenth-century vegetable chapters return to it so often and to tender things so rarely. The instruction to soak in salt water first is a reminder of what garden produce arrived carrying, and it appears in cabbage recipes on both sides of the Atlantic well into the twentieth century.