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Cabbage Pudding
Scald one or more nice tender cabbages; bruise, and season with a little mace or nutmeg, ginger, pepper, and salt; put in some green gooseberries or barberries, and a few large spoonfuls of cold boiled rice or of bread-crumbs; add some butter in small pieces; mix thoroughly with the yolks of four eggs well beaten. Wrap the whole up in a large cabbage leaf, tie it in a cloth, and boil it an hour.
A boiled savoury pudding of the older English kind, held together with egg yolk and sharpened with sour fruit. The technique is the hinge: this is a cloth-boiled pudding, and it will collapse into wet cabbage unless the parcel is tied tightly enough to hold its shape.
- Scald, then dry"Scald" means blanching the whole cabbage in boiling salted water until the leaves are pliable, roughly 4-6 minutes for a Savoy. Drain and press the leaves hard between towels; residual water is the main reason the pudding does not set.
- "Bruise"Chop and then crush the drained cabbage, or pulse it briefly in a processor. It should be a coarse mash, not a purée, so the mixture still has body.
- Barberries and green gooseberriesBoth were garden and hedgerow standbys valued for sourness rather than sweetness. Dried barberries from a Middle Eastern grocer work, soaked 10 minutes; otherwise use a small handful of fresh or frozen gooseberries, or halved seedless grapes with a squeeze of lemon. Figure 3-4 tablespoons for a medium cabbage.
- Spice quantitiesThe original leaves these open. For one cabbage of about 2 lb, a quarter teaspoon each of ground mace or nutmeg and ginger, with a good deal of black pepper and a teaspoon of salt, is in proportion.
- Rice or crumbs"A few large spoonfuls" suggests something like a quarter cup of cold cooked rice or dry breadcrumbs. Cold rice is important; warm rice is starchy and gluey. The recipe does not quantify the butter; about 2 oz, cut small so it disperses, is a reasonable reading.
- Tying the puddingThe original wraps the mixture in a single large blanched leaf and ties that in a cloth. If you prefer, pack it into a leaf-lined basin first, fold the leaves over, and turn it out onto a scalded and floured cloth before tying with string, leaving a little slack for swelling. It goes into water already at a rolling boil, kept just simmering for the hour, with the pan topped up so it stays covered.
- The hour is right, but check the centreUnlike many old boiling times, this one is not excessive: the egg yolks need long enough to set through a dense mass. The pudding is done when a skewer into the middle comes out clean and hot.
- Yield and servingOne cabbage makes enough for four as a side dish, or three as a light supper. Unwrap on a plate rather than a board, cut in wedges, and serve with melted butter, a mustard sauce, or the gravy from a roast joint.
Savoury puddings boiled in a cloth were common in English cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and cabbage was one of many vegetables treated this way: bound with egg and crumbs or rice, wrapped, and set to boil. Boiling a pudding in the same pot as the meat is often described as a fuel-saving convenience of open-hearth cookery. The sour fruit is the period signature. Barberries and unripe gooseberries did the acidulating work that lemon and vinegar do now, and both were common in English kitchen gardens; barberry later fell out of use, and in the United States the shrub was the target of an eradication campaign in the twentieth century because it is an alternate host for black stem rust of wheat.