Home › The Principles of Cookery › Cabbage, Red, Stewed
Cabbage, Red, Stewed
Prepare a large cabbage as if it were going to be pickled. Melt two ounces of butter, or of good beef dripping, in a saucepan, lay the cabbage in it, and cover it with a cupful of vinegar and a pint of nicely-flavoured stock. When it is quite tender, season it with salt and pepper, drain it, and lay it on a hot dish, and arrange sausages round and over it. If preferred the cabbage may be pressed into a mould and poached eggs served with it. It will warm up again perfectly. Time, one hour. Probable cost, 4d. or 6d. Sufficient, one large cabbage for four or five persons.
A straightforward Victorian braise that survives intact as the red cabbage served with sausages across northern Europe. Two phrases need unpacking before you start, and one of them is doing the real work.
- "Prepared as if for pickling"This means quartered, cored, and shredded thin, with the coarse outer leaves discarded. Pickling recipes of the period usually salt the shreds and leave them to drain, often overnight; this recipe says nothing either way, and the cabbage is going straight into liquid.
- The vinegar is not seasoningAcid is what keeps red cabbage red. The anthocyanins turn a dull slate-blue in alkaline or neutral conditions, and hard water alone will do it. Add the cupful of vinegar at the start, not at the end, and avoid an unlined cast-iron pan.
- MeasuresTwo ounces of butter is about 55-57 g; a pint of stock is 20 fl oz British measure (about 570 ml). "Cupful" was not a standardised measure in Victorian kitchens and could mean anywhere from roughly 6 to 10 fl oz, so treat the vinegar as an approximate quantity. Malt or cider vinegar suits this better than wine vinegar.
- TimingOne hour at a bare simmer, covered, is about right for shredded red cabbage, which is far tougher than green and does not overcook easily. Check at 45 minutes; it should be yielding but not collapsing.
- DrainingThe instruction to drain matters. Braising liquid left in the dish will pool under the sausages and make the plate watery. Either drain properly or lift the lid for the last ten minutes and let the liquid reduce to a glaze.
- The mould variationPressing the hot cabbage into a buttered basin and turning it out gives a firm dome that slices; a poached egg on top makes it a supper dish rather than a garnish. It needs to be packed down hard while still hot.
- Cost and yieldFourpence to sixpence puts this at the cheap end of the book's dishes. It serves four or five as a vegetable, and the recipe promises it will warm up again perfectly; the acid probably helps hold both colour and firmness.
Red cabbage came into English kitchens chiefly as a pickle, which is why Cassell's can tell a cook to prepare it "as if it were going to be pickled" and expect to be understood: shredding a red cabbage into a crock with vinegar was a familiar way of keeping it. Stewing it in vinegar and stock, then serving it under sausages, is essentially the German and Flemish treatment, and it reached British cookery books through the nineteenth-century channels that brought sauerkraut into wider use. The dish sits in the book's cheaper ranks — fourpence or sixpence for a vegetable feeding four or five — and it offers a meat version and a meatless one together, so the same page could serve a family with sausages to spare and one with only eggs.