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Cabbage with Rice
Wash some rice, and let it simmer in hot water, with a cabbage sliced up, for about an hour; then strain it off and put the rice and cabbage in a stewpan with some butter, a little pepper and salt, and about a quarter of a grated nutmeg. Toss these about in the butter for ten or fifteen minutes over the fire, but do not let them turn colour; then add a small quantity of water or stock, let them stew till tender, then serve very hot with grated cheese sprinkled over the top.
A frugal Victorian vegetable dish that reads oddly today because the rice is boiled twice. The original gives no quantities at all, so treat the method as the recipe and set your own proportions.
- Quantities to work fromFor four as a side dish, use about 1 cup (200 g) long-grain rice, one small green or Savoy cabbage, 2-3 oz (60-85 g) butter, and roughly 1 cup of stock at the final stage. Cassell's assumes the cook knows what a family portion looks like.
- The hour-long simmerAn hour in water will reduce modern milled long-grain rice to mush and the cabbage to grey threads. Victorian rice may have been older and drier, and was less uniformly milled than today's. Simmer 10-12 minutes for the rice, add sliced cabbage for the last 5, then drain.
- Do not let them turn colourThis is the hinge of the dish. The butter stage is meant to coat and dry the grains, not brown them; keep the heat moderate and the pan moving. Any browning gives a nutty flavour that fights the nutmeg and cheese.
- The nutmegA quarter of a whole grated nutmeg is a generous but deliberate amount, roughly half a teaspoon of freshly grated. Use whole nutmeg on a grater, not pre-ground, or the quantity will taste dusty rather than warm.
- StewpanA stewpan is a straight-sided saucepan with a lid, used on the hob throughout. Nothing here goes in the oven.
- Which cabbageSavoy or a firm white cabbage both work; sliced means shredded across the head, not cut in wedges. Discard the thick core, which will still be hard when the rice is done.
- The cheeseThe book does not name it. Parmesan is the cheese most often specified in Victorian recipes of this type, and a dry Cheddar is a reasonable alternative. Add it at the table so it melts on contact rather than turning stringy in the pan.
- Yield and servingServes four alongside meat, or two as a supper dish. It thickens and stiffens as it cools, so the instruction to serve very hot is practical rather than decorative.
Rice and cabbage cooked together in butter and finished with grated cheese is a pattern found across northern Italy and the Alpine regions, where cabbage was the winter vegetable and rice the cheap bulk starch. The book appeared in the 1870s and was reissued for decades, aimed at middle-class kitchens where economy mattered as much as variety, and dishes like this one earned their place by turning a penny cabbage into something that would carry a sauce or sit beside a roast. The absence of quantities is typical of the whole volume: it was written for cooks who measured by eye and needed the order of operations, not a shopping list. The use of nutmeg with cabbage, which can read as strange now, is often said to have been common in British and Dutch cookery of the period.