Chop a small head of cabbage, then fry 1 onion and 2 sour apples sliced thin. Add the chopped cabbage, ½ cup of stock and the juice of ½ lemon; sprinkle with salt and cayenne pepper; add ½ teaspoonful of curry-powder. Cover and let all simmer until tender. Serve very hot on a border of boiled rice.
August 21 — No. 21
Oriental
A quick braise that reads oddly only because the original omits the fat and the timing. Everything else translates directly.
- The missing fatThe recipe says to fry the onion and apples but never says in what. Two tablespoons of butter or a neutral oil in a wide saute pan is enough.
- Sour applesPeriod cookbooks meant a firm, sharply acid cooking apple " Granny Smith or Bramley works. A sweet dessert apple such as Gala or Fuji will collapse into sauce and unbalance the lemon.
- Head size"A small head" is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 pounds of green cabbage, about 6 cups shredded. Slice it thinly rather than chopping it coarse so it cooks evenly in the small amount of liquid.
- Half a cup of stock is correctIt looks like too little, but the cabbage and apples release a great deal of water. Keep the lid on and resist adding more, or the finished dish will be soupy instead of glazed.
- Timing"Until tender" is 15 to 20 minutes over low heat. Cabbage held much longer turns grey and sulphurous; pull it while the shreds still have a slight bite.
- Curry powder and cayenneModern curry powders are likely to be more assertive than the commercial blends of the period. Start with half the 1/2 teaspoonful called for, and treat the cayenne as a pinch.
- Bloom the spiceStir the curry powder into the hot fat with the onion for 30 seconds before the cabbage goes in. Added later to a wet pan it stays raw and dusty.
- The rice borderA ring of plain boiled rice spooned around the edge of a hot platter, the cabbage heaped in the centre. Long-grain rice, cooked dry, holds the shape best.
- YieldServes four as a vegetable side, or two as a light supper with the rice.
In English-language cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "Oriental" often seems to have functioned less as a geographic claim than as a signal that curry powder was involved fff the commercial blends sold by British grocers, which put a single tin between the home cook and anything vaguely eastern. The dish underneath the label is thoroughly European: cabbage stewed with onion, sour apple and a sharp acid is a staple of German and Austrian kitchens, close kin to the sweet-sour red cabbage served with roast pork and goose. What the curry powder and the ring of boiled rice do is reclassify a peasant vegetable braise as something worldly, which is exactly the purpose of a book organised as a calendar of dishes from every nation: one page a day, a different flag, no passport required. The border of rice was a standard presentation of the era, used for everything from creamed chicken to kidneys, and it arguably survives now mostly in the phrase "served on a bed of rice."