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Delicate Cabbage
Remove all defective leaves, quarter and cut as for coarse slaw, cover well with cold water, and let remain several hours before cooking, then drain and put into pot with enough boiling water to cover; boil until thoroughly cooked (which will generally require about forty-five minutes), add salt ten or fifteen minutes before removing from fire, and when done, take up into a colander, press out the water well, and season with butter and pepper. This is a good dish to serve with corned meats, but should not be cooked with them; if preferred, however, it may be seasoned by adding some of the liquor and fat from the boiling meat to the cabbage while cooking. Or, cut the cabbage in two, remove the hard stock, let stand in cold water two hours, tie in thin netting or piece of muslin, and boil in salted water for a longer time than when it is cut finely. Drain, remove, and serve in a dish with drawn butter or a cream dressing poured over it. - Mrs. E. T. Carson.
A plain boiled cabbage from the 1877 Buckeye Cookery, given in two forms: shredded, or halved and tied in cloth. The main adjustment a modern cook will want is time.
- Forty-five minutes is far too longShredded cabbage is tender in 6-10 minutes in boiling water, and the longer it cooks the more of the sulphur compounds responsible for the smell that gave boiled cabbage its reputation it gives off. Halved wedges need 10-15 minutes, not the "longer time" the recipe calls for.
- The cold-water soakThe long soak was probably meant to draw out insects from field-grown heads and to crisp limp market cabbage, though the recipe gives no reason. With modern cabbage a 15-minute soak, or none at all, is enough.
- "Cut as for coarse slaw"Quarter the head, core it, and cut across into ribbons roughly a quarter-inch wide. Finer than that and it collapses in the pot.
- Pressing in the colanderThis step still matters. Boiled cabbage carries a great deal of water, and pressing it firmly before adding butter is what keeps the dish from turning into a puddle on the plate.
- Tying in nettingA double layer of cheesecloth or a muslin jelly bag works; tie loosely so water circulates. The point is to keep the halves intact for serving whole, not to compress them.
- Drawn butterIn this book drawn butter means melted butter thickened with a little flour and water into a thin sauce, not simply melted butter. A hollandaise or beurre blanc can stand in as a sauce for the boiled halves, though neither is the same preparation.
- Cooking liquor from corned meatThe advice to season with the boiling liquor rather than cook the cabbage with the meat is sound. Add the liquor toward the end and salt cautiously, since corned-beef broth is already heavily salted.
- YieldOne medium head, about 2 lb, serves four to six as a side dish.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Ohio in the 1870s, and its vegetable chapter reflects a household that ate a great deal of cabbage. The insistence on cooking cabbage separately from the corned beef, then borrowing the meat's liquor for seasoning, is a refinement on the older one-pot boiled dinner, and one might read the word "delicate" in the title as signalling a version meant to be gentler on the nose and the digestion than the long-simmered pot of tradition. Cabbage had a persistent reputation in nineteenth-century domestic writing as coarse and windy food, and it is tempting to see receipts like this one, with their soaking, draining and butter dressing, as making the case that it belonged on a respectable table. That the recipe still calls for forty-five minutes shows how gradually the case for short cooking was won.