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Stuffed Cabbage
Take a large, fresh cabbage and cut out heart; fill vacancy with stuffing made of cooked chicken or veal, chopped very fine and highly seasoned and rolled into balls with yolk of egg. Then tie cabbage firmly together (some tie a cloth around it), and boil in a covered kettle two hours. This is a delicious dish and is useful in using up cold meats. - Mrs. W. A. Croffut, New York City.
A whole stuffed cabbage boiled in a cloth is straightforward once you accept that the two-hour boil belongs to a colder kitchen and a tougher cabbage. The instructions assume you already have cooked meat on hand, which is the whole point of the dish.
- The hinge: keep the head intactCut the core out from the stem end with a narrow knife, working around it in a cone, and leave the outer leaves and the base of the head unbroken. If the head splits, the stuffing leaches into the water and you are left with cabbage soup.
- Two hours is too longA modern hybrid cabbage collapses to grey mush well before that. A 2-3 lb head at a bare simmer needs roughly 50-60 minutes; the meat is already cooked, so you are only cooking the cabbage through. Test the stem end with a skewer.
- Simmer, do not boilA rolling boil in a covered kettle batters the head apart and cooks off the sulphur compounds into the kitchen. Keep the water barely trembling and half to two-thirds up the cabbage.
- The clothA clean square of unbleached muslin or cheesecloth, wrung out in water, wrapped round the head and tied at the top with kitchen string. This is the more reliable of the two methods given, and it lets you lift the cabbage out in one piece.
- "Highly seasoned"The recipe names no seasonings; in a dish of this period that would most likely mean salt and black pepper, possibly mace or nutmeg, and perhaps a little onion, thyme or parsley. Season the stuffing more aggressively than seems right: boiling water pulls flavour out, and cabbage is bland.
- Egg yolk as binderOne yolk binds roughly a cup of finely chopped meat. If the mixture will not hold a ball, add a spoonful of soft breadcrumb or a little of the meat's own jelly rather than more egg, which turns the filling rubbery.
- Cooked meat onlyThe recipe is written for leftovers - cold roast chicken or veal already fully cooked. Raw ground meat in the cavity of a whole head will not reach a safe temperature reliably in the centre; if you want to use raw meat, brown and cook it through first.
- Serving and yieldA 3 lb head serves four to six. Drain it well, cut down through the head in wedges at the table so each portion gets stuffing, and serve with melted butter, a plain white sauce, or the pan juices. Vinegar is a traditional accompaniment to boiled cabbage if you want one.
Buckeye Cookery (published in 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, out of Marysville, Ohio, following the 1876 Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, which it revised and retitled) is a compilation book, and this contribution from a New York City correspondent shows the network of correspondents such volumes drew on. The dish itself is a survival of a very old European technique - a whole cabbage hollowed, filled and boiled in a cloth, cousin to the individual stuffed leaves found from Poland to the Levant and to the English boiled pudding tied in a floured cloth. The compilers valued it, as the note says outright, for using up cold meats, and thrift is the organising virtue of the whole book. Boiling in a cloth was standard equipment-free cookery in a kitchen with one kettle over one fire, and it kept the cabbage's shape without a mould.