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Cabbage and Bacon
Boil a piece of pickled pork until it is about three-quarters cooked. Then take it out of the water, drain it, and place two or three rashers of bacon in the saucepan. Lay on these a cabbage which has been thoroughly washed and cut into quarters, and put the pork over the cabbage. Cover the whole with nicely-flavoured stock; add pepper, nutmeg, and parsley, but no salt, as it will most likely be found there is sufficient in the bacon and stock. Simmer gently until the cabbage is cooked. Place the vegetables on a hot dish with the pork in the midst of them; thicken the gravy, and pour it over the whole. Time to boil the cabbage, twenty minutes. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A one-pot braise of salt pork and cabbage that depends entirely on how salty your cured meat is. Taste the stock before it reduces, because the finished gravy concentrates everything in it.
- Pickled porkThis is pork brine-cured but not smoked y is is a raw gammon joint, unsmoked bacon joint, or American-style salt pork. Soak a heavily salted piece in cold water for a few hours, or overnight, and discard that water before boiling.
- Three-quarters cookedThe recipe gives no weight, but for a joint of around 2 lb that is roughly half an hour at a bare simmer; it should be firm but yielding to a skewer. It finishes in the pan with the cabbage, so leaving it underdone at this stage is the point.
- Rashers as a bedThe recipe does not say why, but the bacon on the bottom of the pan would keep the cabbage off the metal and season the liquid from below. Streaky rather than back bacon will give a richer gravy.
- Hold the saltThe instruction is a real one, not caution for its own sake. Between the cure on the pork, the bacon, and a reduced stock, the gravy can easily go past edible. Season only at the end, after thickening.
- Twenty minutes of cabbageThat is Victorian timing for quartered cabbage sitting in liquid, and it will be soft rather than crisp. If you want it to hold its shape, cut into eighths and give it 10-12 minutes, testing the thick core.
- Thickening the gravyNo method is given. Lift out the meat and cabbage, then either reduce the liquid hard or whisk in a beurre manié of equal butter and flour, about a tablespoon of each per cup of stock. Simmer two minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- NutmegA modest grating, no more than a quarter teaspoon for the whole pot. Nutmeg turns up often in Victorian savoury cooking and here reads as warmth rather than as spice.
- YieldFour to five as written, on one cabbage and a joint whose weight the recipe never states. Serve with boiled potatoes to take up the gravy.
Cabbage cooked in the liquor of cured pork is one of the oldest patterns in northern European cooking, and versions of it turn up as Irish bacon and cabbage, French potee and the German pairing of pork with sauerkraut. What marks this particular version as Victorian and English is the refinement laid over the peasant original: the meat is not simply boiled with the vegetable but part-cooked separately, the pot is moistened with a "nicely-flavoured stock" rather than water, the cabbage is seasoned with nutmeg and parsley, and the cooking liquid is thickened into a gravy before serving. The method demonstrates several lessons at once - building flavour in layers within one pan, using a cured meat as the seasoning agent, and the discipline of withholding salt when the ingredients already carry it. Pickled pork was a household staple in an era before domestic refrigeration, when a barrel of brined meat was an ordinary way to keep pork through the year.