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GREENS (a la Creme)
Wash and boil two young cabbages in the usual way; press them between two plates to drain the water from them. Roll a lump of butter the size of an egg in some flour; stir it over the fire with a wooden spoon till it is quite smooth, but not in the least coloured. Add, gradually, a quarter of a pint of cream, a teaspoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, and the eighth of a nutmeg grated. Simmer for ten minutes, and serve poured over the cabbages. Time, from fifteen to twenty minutes to boil the cabbages. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain white sauce enriched with cream, poured over boiled cabbage. The only real work is keeping the roux pale and cooking the cabbage far less than the book tells you to.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. The recipe does not quantify the flour; about 2 tablespoons suits the quantity of cream given here.
- A quarter of a pint of creamThe imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 5 fl oz — a scant 2/3 cup. Single or light cream behaves as the original intends; heavy cream will thicken further and may need loosening with milk.
- Not in the least colouredThis is the hinge. The roux is cooked only long enough to lose its raw taste, over gentle heat, so the finished sauce stays white and tastes of cream rather than toast. Once it takes on any colour the dish is a different, nuttier thing.
- Boiling timeFifteen to twenty minutes will reduce young cabbage to grey mush and drive off the sulphur compounds as smell rather than flavour. Shredded young cabbage needs 4–6 minutes in well-salted water, wedges 8–10; drain the moment it gives to a knife tip.
- Pressing between two platesA Victorian habit worth keeping in principle — wet cabbage will thin the sauce on the plate. A firm press in a colander or a brief spell in a dry pan over low heat does the same job without flattening the leaves.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of pepper in 5 fl oz of sauce is assertive by current taste; start with a quarter and adjust. An eighth of a whole nutmeg is about 1/4 teaspoon grated.
- Simmer for ten minutesKeep it barely trembling and stir often. A cream sauce this small in volume catches quickly.
- YieldTwo small young cabbages and this quantity of sauce serve five or six as a side dish, in line with the original's claim. The 1s 3d probable cost is not broken down in the book, though the cream and butter would be the expensive part.
Cassell's is a dictionary arranged alphabetically, and the phrase à la crème signals the borrowed French method rather than any French dish in particular: a béchamel-type white sauce, made pale on purpose, poured over a boiled English vegetable. Nineteenth-century British cookery treated boiled greens as a near-daily necessity and cream sauce as the standard means of making them worth eating at a respectable table — the same treatment turns up in the period applied to cauliflower, celery, onions and seakale. The long boiling time is often said to reflect a belief of the era that green vegetables were indigestible until thoroughly softened, an assumption later cooks reversed entirely. The care taken to specify that the roux must not colour is telling: whiteness was the mark of a properly made sauce and a well-drilled kitchen.