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Sour Cabbage
2 quarts chopped cabbage, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 cup vinegar, salt and pepper to taste.
Soak cabbage in cold water for 1 hour; drain; place it in an uncovered kettle of boiling salted water, cook 20 minutes; drain and return to kettle. Add vinegar, bring cabbage to boiling-point and cook 5 minutes. Add Crisco, salt and pepper to taste.
A plain boiled cabbage sharpened with vinegar, from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks. The method is sound but the timing belongs to an era that cooked vegetables into submission.
- The timing is the thingTwenty minutes of boiling followed by five more with vinegar leaves chopped cabbage grey and limp. Five to eight minutes in the boiling water is enough for shreds, then a minute or two more with the vinegar to season through.
- QuantityTwo quarts of chopped cabbage is roughly one small head, about 1 1/2 lb trimmed. It cooks down to four to six side servings.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, the product this book existed to sell. It contributes fat and nothing else here; butter, olive oil or bacon fat all do the job better and add flavour the shortening cannot.
- Uncovered kettleNot an oversight; older cookbooks commonly direct that cabbage be boiled uncovered, and an open pot does let some of the volatile sulfur compounds released by brassicas escape rather than condense back into the water. Worth keeping.
- Acid at the endVinegar goes in after the cabbage has boiled because acid tends to keep vegetable pectin from breaking down, so the shreds soften more slowly. Added at the start it will make the cabbage slower to tenderise.
- The hour-long soakOlder books call for soaking cabbage in cold water, variously to freshen and crisp it and, it is often said, to draw out insects from garden heads. Modern heads need a rinse and no more; skip it unless the cabbage came from a field.
- ServingSeason generously off the heat and taste again once the fat has melted in. Half a cup of vinegar to a small head is assertive, so add it in stages if you want something gentler.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s to demonstrate uses for Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company had introduced in 1911; nearly every recipe in it calls for the product, which is why a dish of boiled cabbage lists two tablespoons of shortening as though it were essential. The dish itself is far older than the book and far older than the fat: sweet-sour cabbage cooked with vinegar is standard across German, Austrian and Central European cooking, and versions of it came into American kitchens with those immigrant households, where bacon drippings or butter, rather than a branded shortening, were the usual enrichment.