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Colcannon
3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/2 lb. cold cooked potatoes 1/2 lb. cold cooked cabbage 1 onion Salt and pepper to taste Chop onion and cabbage and mash potatoes. Put into frying pan with Crisco and fry few minutes adding seasonings. Turn into Criscoed fireproof dish and brown in oven.
A frying-pan colcannon built from leftovers, finished under oven heat for a crust. The whole point is dryness — wet potato or steamy cabbage will never brown.
- CriscoCrisco was new hydrogenated vegetable shortening when this book was written, and it appears throughout, the book having been published to promote it. Butter, bacon fat or oil all work; 3 tablespoons is about 45 ml.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf a pound of cooked potatoes is roughly 2 medium potatoes, or about 1 cup mashed. Half a pound of cooked cabbage is around 1 1/2 cups once cooked, from about a quarter of a small head. Serves 2 to 3 as a side.
- "Brown in oven"No temperature is given. Use 400–425F on an upper rack, 15–20 minutes, until the top is crusted. A broiler for 3–4 minutes does the same job faster if the dish is already hot.
- The raw onionThe onion goes into the pan uncooked and only gets "a few minutes" of frying. Give it 5–6 minutes on its own in the fat before the potato and cabbage go in, or it will stay sharp and squeaky in the finished dish.
- Press, then leave aloneSpread the mixture and let it sit undisturbed in the hot pan so a crust forms underneath before you transfer it. Stirring constantly produces a uniform paste with no contrast, which is the failure mode of every fried-potato hash.
- Cold ingredients matterThe recipe calls for cold cooked potatoes and cabbage, as befits a leftovers dish; cold, drier vegetables also fry rather than steam.
- Fireproof dishAn early term for ovenproof earthenware or enamelled iron. A cast-iron skillet lets you fry and brown in the same vessel, skipping the transfer entirely.
- SeasoningBoiled cabbage and plain potato are both bland; be more aggressive with salt and pepper than the instruction suggests, and taste before it goes into the oven.
Colcannon is an Irish dish whose name is generally traced to cál ceannann, roughly "white-headed cabbage," and it exists in dozens of household versions — some mashed and soft with milk and butter, others, like this one, fried into a cake. It belongs to the large family of leftover-vegetable fries that includes English bubble and squeak: cold boiled potato and cold boiled greens were what a kitchen had on hand the day after a boiled dinner. Its appearance here, in a Crisco promotional cookbook, is worth noting. Such books were written for Procter & Gamble to demonstrate that the new hydrogenated shortening could stand in for butter, lard and drippings, and a humble Irish standby cooked in frying fat made the argument as well as anything fancier.