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Cabbage, Boiled
Cut off the stalk, remove the faded outer leaves, and halve, or, if large, quarter the cabbages. Wash them thoroughly, and lay them for a few minutes in water to which a table-spoonful of vinegar has been added, for the purpose of destroying any insects that may be present. Drain them in a colander. Put them in a large saucepan of boiling water, to which a table-spoonful of salt and a very small piece of soda have been added, and let them boil quickly for six minutes, pressing them down two or three times to keep them well under the water. Then take them out and throw them into another saucepan prepared just like the first. Let them boil ten minutes, and repeat the process, letting them boil the third time until tender. Serve as hot as possible, with melted butter or white sauce poured over them. Time: small summer cabbage, twenty minutes or more; large cabbage, from half to three-quarters of an hour. Sufficient, one small cabbage for two persons.
A late-Victorian method built around two assumptions modern cooks have abandoned: that cabbage should be boiled until thoroughly soft, and that the water should be changed repeatedly to carry off its smell. Both can go.
- The timing is the main thingThirty to forty-five minutes of boiling produces grey, sulphurous, collapsed cabbage. Wedges of a firm green or white cabbage are done in 6-10 minutes in salted boiling water; shredded cabbage needs 3-5. Test the thick stalk end with a knife tip rather than watching the clock.
- Skip the changes of waterThe three successive pans were presumably meant to carry off the strong smell and flavour of long-boiled cabbage. Cook the cabbage briefly instead and the problem does not arise; changing the water simply leaches out flavour and water-soluble vitamins.
- The "very small piece of soda"This is bicarbonate of soda, added to fix the green colour in alkaline water. It also dissolves the pectin in the cell walls, giving a slippery texture, and destroys much of the vitamin C. Leave it out entirely.
- The vinegar soakA tablespoon of vinegar in cold water was an insect purge for garden cabbages that arrived with lodgers in the leaves. With supermarket cabbage a rinse is enough; with anything from a garden or box scheme, a 10-minute soak in plain salted or acidulated water still works.
- Salt quantityA tablespoon per large pan of water is not far off modern practice, comparable to the proportions often given for pasta water. It seasons the cabbage as it cooks.
- Drain hardBoiled cabbage holds a surprising amount of water between the leaves. Press it in the colander before saucing, or the melted butter or white sauce will slide straight off into a puddle.
- Sauce and yield"Melted butter" in Victorian cookery books commonly means a thin butter-and-flour sauce rather than plain drawn butter; plain browned butter, or a b"cabbage" b fchamel, both suit. One small cabbage for two is generous by current appetites -- a 1½ lb head will serve three or four as a side.
Cabbage was among the cheapest and most widely eaten English vegetables of the nineteenth century, and the reputation it acquired for stench and sogginess owes much to methods like this one, in which the vegetable is boiled through three separate pans of water for the better part of an hour. The pinch of soda has a long history in English kitchens as a colour-fixer — alkaline water keeps chlorophyll bright green for a while — and cookery writers went on recommending it well into the twentieth century, even as others objected that it ruined the texture. The vinegar soak is a reminder that vegetables arrived from the garden or market unwashed and often inhabited, an assumption the recipe makes without embarrassment.