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Fried Cabbage
Cut the cabbage very fine, on a slaw cutter, if possible; salt and pepper, stir well, and let stand five minutes. Have an iron kettle smoking hot, drop one table-spoon lard into it, then the cabbage, stirring briskly until quite tender; send to table immediately. One half cup sweet cream, and three table-spoons vinegar-the vinegar added after the cream has been well stirred, and after taken .
A fast, high-heat cabbage sauté finished with cream and vinegar — closer to a stir-fry than to the long-boiled cabbage of most nineteenth-century tables. The verbatim text runs out of steam at the end, so the finish needs reading carefully.
- The garbled last lineThe fragment "after taken" almost certainly ended "from the fire," so the sense is: off the heat, stir in the half cup of cream, then add the three tablespoons of vinegar last. Adding vinegar to hot cream before it has coated the cabbage encourages it to curdle.
- Heat is the whole point"Smoking hot" iron is not hyperbole — the cabbage should hiss and colour at the edges rather than steam in its own liquid. A wide cast-iron skillet works better than a deep kettle because moisture escapes.
- Salting firstThe five-minute rest draws water out of the shreds. Squeeze or blot that liquid off before the cabbage hits the fat, or the pan temperature drops and you get a braise.
- "Sweet cream"Simply fresh, unsoured cream, as opposed to the soured cream common in farm kitchens. Heavy or whipping cream is the closest modern match; half-and-half will thin out.
- LardOne tablespoon of fat is lean by modern standards for a panful of cabbage. Lard, bacon drippings or a neutral oil all work; butter will brown too fast at the heat called for.
- "Quite tender"Five to eight minutes for finely shredded cabbage over high heat. Cabbage cooked much past that turns grey and sulphurous — the shortness of the cooking is what distinguishes this from the boiled cabbage of the era.
- Slaw cutterA mandoline, the slicing disc of a food processor, or a sharp knife on a halved and cored head. Uniform thin shreds cook evenly; chunks will not.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; the half cup of cream and three tablespoons of vinegar suit roughly a medium head, which would serve four to six as a side. Serve straight from the pan; it slumps on standing.
Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Marysville, Ohio, and appeared there in the 1870s — the 1877 Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping following the 1876 Centennial Buckeye Cook Book. Cabbage recurs through its vegetable chapter: in slaws, in kraut, boiled with pork, and here fried. The cream-and-vinegar finish follows the same sweet-sour logic as hot German slaw and Speckkraut, a tradition strong among the German-speaking settlers of Ohio and Pennsylvania, though the book itself claims no such descent. It is also a reminder that cabbage was a winter staple rather than a luxury: it kept for months in a cellar or a straw-covered pit, and a cook needed a dozen ways to make the same head taste different in February.