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Ladies' Cabbage
Cut small, hardhead cabbage into halves; remove core and harder portions, chop remaining part quite fine. Throw this into kettle of boiling salted water, boil uncovered for 30 minutes; drain in colander. Put cabbage back in saucepan, add 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1 tablespoon flour; dust flour over cabbage; stir carefully with wooden spoon, and add 1/2 pint of milk, 1/2 teaspoon of salt and 1 saltspoon of white pepper. Stand this on back part of stove to simmer 10 minutes; send to table.
A creamed cabbage in the plainest sense: boiled, drained, then finished with a quick roux in the pan. Two things need attention — the boiling time and the fat.
- The 30-minute boilLong open boiling of cabbage was common in cookbooks of this period, but it leaves the shreds grey and sulphurous. Finely chopped cabbage is tender in 8 to 10 minutes; drain it well, since waterlogged cabbage will thin the sauce.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it. Crisco is still made, but butter or a neutral oil will do the same job here — you need 2 tablespoons of fat to carry 1 tablespoon of flour.
- Cook the flourDusting raw flour over hot cabbage and adding milk straight away leaves a pasty edge. Let the fat and flour bubble together for a minute in the empty pan before the cabbage and milk go back in.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. Whole milk gives the body the recipe assumes; skimmed milk will stay loose even after the simmer.
- A saltspoonTake it as a quarter teaspoon. Saltspoons were a real piece of table silver and their capacity varied, but not enough to matter here.
- Back part of the stoveThe cool end of a coal range — the lowest setting on a modern burner, or the flame off and the pan covered. The ten minutes is for the sauce to thicken and the flavours to settle, not for further cooking.
- Hardhead cabbageA firm, dense green cabbage — what a supermarket sells simply as green cabbage. Savoy is looser-leaved and softer, so it suits this treatment less well.
- YieldA small head serves four as a side dish. Serve immediately; the sauce skins over and the cabbage weeps if it stands.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which is why every recipe in it reaches for Crisco — the shortening had been introduced only a few years earlier and the company published cookbooks to teach American households what to do with it. The dish itself is older than the book: versions of "Ladies' Cabbage" appear in American household manuals through the second half of the nineteenth century, usually chopped fine, boiled, and bound with milk, butter and sometimes beaten eggs before baking. The name is generally taken to mark it as the genteel treatment of a vegetable otherwise associated with plain boiling and strong smells — cabbage made fit for company.