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Peggy's Sour Cabbage
Select a small, firm head of white cabbage; cut in quarters, remove the tough stalk and shave crosswise as fine as possible. Put cabbage in a large frying pan, cover with water, cover closely and cook until cabbage is tender (from forty to eighty minutes). Season with salt the last fifteen minutes of cooking. Drain and add onethird to one-half cup of butter, toss cabbage until well buttered, sauté until some of the cabbage is delicately browned. Season with pepper, and add vinegar to taste. Serve hot. 2 tablespoons butter. 3 tablespoons flour. ½ teaspoon salt.
A plain braise-then-fry cabbage dish that depends on cooking the cabbage all the way soft before it ever meets fat. The one thing to note is that the ingredient list printed at the end does not belong to it.
- The stray ingredient listThe trailing "2 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, 1½ teaspoon salt" has nothing to do with this cabbage, which is finished with a third to a half cup of butter and no flour at all. It appears to be a fragment left over from an adjacent recipe and should be ignored.
- Cook it soft firstThe browning step only works on cabbage that is already fully tender; shreds still holding a bite will scorch at the edges before they colour evenly. Do not shorten the boil to save time.
- Forty to eighty minutesPresumably the range allows for how finely the cabbage was shaved and how old the head was. Finely shaved cabbage from a young head will often be tender well short of forty minutes; judge by texture, not the clock.
- Salt at the endThe recipe holds the salt back to the last quarter-hour; there is no harm in following it, though salting earlier is unlikely to toughen the cabbage.
- The butterA third to a half cup is 5 to 8 tablespoons for one small head, which is generous by modern standards. Three or four tablespoons will brown the cabbage adequately if you want a lighter dish.
- Drain thoroughlyPress the cabbage in the colander before it goes back in the pan. Water left clinging to it will steam rather than fry, and nothing will brown.
- The vinegarCider or white wine vinegar, added off the heat, a tablespoon at a time. It is what makes the dish "sour"; add it too early and the sharpness cooks off.
- YieldNo yield is given; one small head should serve about four as a side dish.
Sweet-and-sour and simply soured cabbage runs through German, Austrian and Central European home cooking, and arrived in American kitchens with those immigrant households. 52 Sunday Dinners was a menu book, organising a year of family meals week by week, and cabbage suited such a plan because it was a keeper — a firm winter head held in a cellar through to spring, when little else green had yet come in.