Take a large cabbage; remove the outer leaves and the inside, leaving a frame. Chop all the cabbage from the inside and fry in hot grease with 1 sliced onion. Remove from the fire. Mix well with bread-crumbs and ½ cup of chopped ham, 2 eggs, salt, black pepper and cayenne. Refill the cabbage; put on the outside leaves; cover the top with leaves. Put in a baking-pan; sprinkle with bits of butter and pour in ½ cup of water. Let bake until brown. Serve hot.
A stuffed whole cabbage, hollowed out and refilled with its own chopped middle. The original gives no oven temperature, no time and no yield, so the numbers below are the working ones.
- The hinge: keep the shell intactCore the cabbage and cut the interior out from the base with a long thin knife, leaving a wall of leaves an inch or so thick. If the shell splits the filling escapes and the dish becomes a pan of fried cabbage. Blanching the whole head for 5 minutes first makes the leaves pliable and far less likely to tear.
- "Hot grease"Lard, bacon fat or beef drippings, the fats a kitchen of this period would likely have had at hand. About 3 tablespoons. Butter or oil works, though the smoky fat is closer to the intent.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F. A large head takes 1 to 1½ hours covered, then uncover for the last 15-20 minutes to get the browning the recipe asks for. The half cup of water is there to keep the pan from scorching; top it up if it dries out.
- Bread-crumbs, unmeasuredThe quantity is left to the cook. Roughly 1 to 1½ cups of dry crumbs binds the filling from an average head without making it stodgy. Add them gradually until the mixture just holds together.
- HamA half cup of chopped ham, salty and usually already cooked. Salt the filling lightly and taste before the eggs go in, not after.
- DonenessThe eggs and ham make this a bound stuffing that needs to set through. Test the center of the filling at 160F rather than judging by the color of the outer leaves, which brown well before the middle is hot.
- Serving and yieldOne large cabbage feeds four to six. Tie the head with kitchen string before baking, lift it whole to a platter, snip the string and cut it into wedges like a cake so each portion gets shell and filling.
Stuffed whole cabbage belongs to a broad Central and Eastern European family of dishes in which a cheap, storable vegetable is made to carry a small amount of meat, and it is close kin to the rolled cabbage parcels of the same regions. What sets this version apart is the frame: nothing is thrown away, the interior becomes the filling, and the outer leaves are laid back on as a lid to keep the whole thing moist. Cabbage was central to German and German-American cooking through the nineteenth century because it kept in a cellar all winter, and half a cup of ham for a whole head may suggest something about how sparingly meat was used in ordinary households, though a single recipe is thin evidence for that. The book itself is a novelty of its era, one dish per day of the year with each assigned a nationality, and such collections handled cuisines briskly and by reputation rather than by close research, so the label "German" marks a general style more than any particular regional recipe.