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Scalloped Cabbage
Cut one-half large head or one small head boiled cabbage, in pieces. Cover with one cup White Sauce, sprinkle with one-third cup grated cheese, two tablespoons finely chopped pimentos; season with salt, pepper, mix well. Turn into a well-greased baking dish and cover with buttered crumbs; place on grate in oven and bake until heated throughout and crumbs are browned.
A straightforward gratin that assumes you already know how to make white sauce and boil a cabbage. The book leaves out both quantities and oven heat, so a few numbers help.
- Drain the cabbage hardThis is the hinge. Boiled cabbage holds a great deal of water, and any that remains will thin the sauce into a puddle under the crumbs. Press the pieces in a colander, then spread them on a towel before saucing.
- Don't boil it farPeriod practice was to boil cabbage twenty minutes or more, which gives grey, sulphurous leaves. Five to eight minutes in well-salted water leaves it firm enough to survive the oven.
- One cup White SauceA standard medium white sauce of the period: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. Season it before it meets the cabbage.
- Oven heatNone is given. Bake at 400F, on a rack in the upper third, for about 20 minutes -- long enough to heat through and colour the crumbs without the sauce breaking.
- "Place on grate in oven"This means the oven rack, not a broiler grate; in a range of the period the wording presumably distinguished rack-baking from setting the dish on the oven floor.
- Grated cheeseAt this date most likely a firm American or Cheddar-type cheese. A third of a cup is roughly 1 1/4 oz grated; sharper cheddar carries better against cabbage.
- PimentosCanned or jarred pimentos, which were relatively new and fashionable in American cooking at the time. Jarred roasted red peppers, drained and blotted, are the closest modern stand-in.
- Buttered crumbsAbout 1/2 cup dry breadcrumbs tossed with 1 1/2 tablespoons melted butter. Dry crumbs, not fresh -- fresh ones absorb the sauce and go soggy.
- YieldServes four as a side dish in a 1-quart baking dish.
52 Sunday Dinners was written by Elizabeth O. Hiller, a Chicago cooking-school teacher, and issued by the N. K. Fairbank Company, makers of Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil shortening -- one of many cookbooks of the era published to put a manufacturer's product into home kitchens. The scalloped vegetable is the workhorse of that period's American table: anything boiled could be cut up, bound with white sauce, crumbed and browned, and the technique appears dozens of times across such books with only the vegetable changing. Pimentos give the date away. Canned Spanish-style pimentos had become widely available in the United States in the first years of the twentieth century, and cooks used them freely for colour in pale dishes -- creamed chicken, cheese spreads, and gratins exactly like this one.