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To Dress Cabbage
If intended to be eaten by itself with bread, this sauce is very delicious. Take two ounces of butter, two ounces of flour, a pint of milk, three ounces of grated cheese, half a teaspoonful of salt, quarter of a teaspoonful of pepper; mix all carefully together with the yolk of an egg, and stir them frequently, continuously as it begins to thicken and simmer; after pouring this sauce over the cabbage, strew bread crumbs over the top and brown in the oven. Very fine.
This is a mornay sauce poured over cooked cabbage and gratinéed — the original assumes you already know how to boil the cabbage, and gives no oven temperature.
- The missing first stepCabbage must be cooked before the sauce goes on. Quarter or thickly shred a firm head, boil or steam until just tender (8-12 minutes for wedges), then drain very well and press out water — a watery cabbage will thin the sauce into soup in the dish.
- The sauce is a standard white sauceTwo ounces butter, two ounces flour and a pint of milk is 4 tablespoons butter and a scant 1/2 cup flour to 2 cups milk — 2 1/2 cups if the book's pint is the imperial one. Either way it is a thick béchamel by modern taste. Cook the butter and flour together a minute or two before the milk goes in so it does not taste of raw flour.
- Egg yolk timingDo not stir the yolk into the hot pan directly. Take the thickened sauce off the heat, whisk a ladleful into the beaten yolk, then return it — added cold to a simmering pan it will scramble into threads. Once the yolk is in, keep the sauce below a boil.
- The cheeseThree ounces grated cheese is about 3/4 cup packed. The recipe does not say which cheese; a firm aged Cheddar or Gruyère suits it. Add it off the heat and stir until it melts rather than boiling it, which makes cheese sauce grainy and oily.
- Oven heat for browningThe recipe only says brown. Use 425F on a high shelf for 10-15 minutes, or run it under the broiler for 3-4 minutes — everything in the dish is already cooked, so the aim is colour, not further cooking.
- CrumbsDry crumbs brown better than fresh; tossing them with a little melted butter first gives an even gold rather than scorched patches.
- YieldThis quantity of sauce dresses one medium cabbage, roughly 4 to 6 servings as a side, or 3 as the light supper with bread the recipe suggests.
Dressing a boiled vegetable with a floury white sauce, cheese and browned crumbs is the domestic English counterpart of the French gratin. The opening line matters: eaten by itself with bread signals a dish meant to stand as a supper in its own right, and cabbage was cheap and kept well through winter. The technique — butter and flour cooked together, milk, then cheese and an egg yolk for richness — is close to what cookery writing calls a mornay, though this recipe does not use the French name and simply describes the ingredients in order.