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Creamed Cabbage
Slice as for cold slaw and stew in a covered sauce-pan till tender; drain it, return to sauce-pan, add a gill or more of rich cream, one ounce of butter, pepper and salt to taste; let simmer two or three minutes, then serve. Milk may be used by adding a little more butter; or have a deep spider hot, put in sliced cabbage, pour quickly over it a pint of boiling water, cover close and cook for ten minutes, then pour off water and add half pint of rich milk. When the milk boils, stir in a tea-spoon of flour moistened with a little milk, season, cook a moment, serve.
A plain buttered-cabbage recipe with two routes: cream finished off the heat, or milk thickened with a little flour. The only thing that will ruin it is overcooking.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. "A gill or more" means start there and add until the cabbage is coated rather than swimming.
- A spiderA cast-iron skillet, originally one with legs for hearth cooking. Any wide, heavy pan with a tight lid does the job; width matters more than depth so the cabbage steams evenly.
- Slice as for cold slawCold slaw is coleslaw. Shred the cabbage finely, as you would for slaw; the finer the shred, the better the short cooking time in the second method will serve.
- Stew till tenderThe first method assumes cabbage cooked in a little water in a covered pan. Finely shredded cabbage is tender in 8 to 12 minutes; past that it turns grey and sulphurous. Test early.
- Drain it properlyCabbage holds a surprising amount of water, and any left behind will thin the cream into a puddle. Press it in the colander before returning it to the pan.
- Don't boil the creamTwo or three minutes at a bare simmer, as the recipe says, is enough to warm it through. A hard boil risks the cream separating.
- The flour versionA teaspoon of flour slaked in cold milk into half a pint of hot milk gives the thinnest possible sauce, barely more than a gloss. Let it cook a full minute rather than "a moment" if you want the raw-flour taste gone.
- Quantity and yieldThe recipe names no weight of cabbage; the dairy quantities suggest something on the order of one medium head, served as a side dish.
Cabbage was one of the cheapest and longest-keeping vegetables in a nineteenth-century American cellar, and Buckeye Cookery treats it accordingly: several variations of one economical idea. The choice between cream, milk, and milk thickened with flour is a choice among dairy on hand, and the flour is there to make half a pint of milk behave like cream. The "spider" named in the second method is a reminder of how recently the book was written to hearth-cooking habits here skskillet meant to stand over coals, and it stuck to flat-bottomed stove pans for decades after the legs disappeared. Boiled cabbage dressed with butter or milk is common to English, Irish, and German cooking alike, all three of which fed heavily into Ohio kitchens of the 1870s and 80s.