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Kale, Scotch
Scotch kale (or kail), or curly greens, is cooked like ordinary greens. Wash it very carefully, and throw it into fast-boiling salted water. The saucepan should remain uncovered in order to preserve the dark green colour. Young Scotch kale will take about twenty minutes to boil tender. Serve with a little butter, pepper, and salt.
A one-paragraph method from an era when green vegetables were boiled hard and long. The technique is sound in outline; the timing is the part to reconsider.
- Twenty minutes is too longModern curly kale, even young, is tender in 5 to 8 minutes of hard boiling, and the older leaves in 10 to 12. Twenty minutes gives the grey-khaki, sulphurous cabbage that Victorian cookery is remembered for.
- Why the lid stays offThe advice is correct: volatile acids released by brassicas concentrate under a lid and turn chlorophyll from bright green to olive. An open pan and a high, fast boil are the two things that keep the colour.
- Plenty of water, well saltedUse a large pan so the water never stops boiling when the kale goes in, and salt it as you would pasta water. Cooking a big volume of leaf in a small pan of water is the other common cause of drab colour.
- "Scotch kale" and "curly greens"Both names here mean the same thing: the hardy curly-leaved kale sold today as curly kale or borecole. Cavolo nero and Russian kales are more tender and cook a little faster.
- Wash it very carefullyNot a throwaway line. Curled leaves trap grit and, in field-grown kale, aphids in the crinkles. Two changes of cold water, agitated, before the leaves go near the pan.
- StemsThe book assumes young kale with tender ribs. Supermarket kale is often mature; strip the leaf from the thick central stalk, or the stalks will still be woody when the leaf is overdone.
- Finishing and yieldDrain hard, press out water in a colander, then toss with butter, pepper and salt while still steaming. Allow about 8 oz (225 g) of untrimmed kale per person as a side dish.
Kale is among the oldest forms of cultivated brassica in northern Europe, grown long before hearting cabbages became common, and it held on longest in Scotland, where the kailyard was a fixture of the cottage garden and "kail" served as a general word for both the plant and the broth made from it. Its virtue was hardiness: it stands through frost when nothing else in the plot survives, and it is traditionally said that a touch of frost sweetens the leaves, which has some basis in the plant's conversion of starches to sugars in cold weather.