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Kale, Sea, Boiled
Let the kale lie in cold water for half an hour, then wash and trim it, and tie in small bunches, put these into a good quantity of boiling water with some salt in it, and let the kale keep boiling until tender. Lift it out, drain the water from it, and send it to table with melted butter or white sauce. Time, about a quarter of an hour; but it may be boiled a few minutes longer, if liked well done. Probable cost, 10d. per basket. Sufficient, four or five heads for each person.
A plain boiling method for blanched sea kale, one of the few genuinely native British vegetables. The main thing a modern cook has to correct is the timing, which will reduce good sea kale to string.
- What sea kale isCrambe maritima, a coastal perennial whose young shoots are blanched under pots or shingle so they come up ivory white with a pale green tip. It is not curly kale and not Swiss chard; the flavour sits somewhere between asparagus and a mild hazelnut. Where it is unavailable, forced chicory or white asparagus is the nearest substitute in texture and treatment, though neither tastes the same.
- TimingA quarter of an hour is longer than modern blanched sea kale needs, as it is usually sold as slim shoots. Eight to twelve minutes in fast-boiling water is enough for thick stems, five to eight for thin ones; test with the point of a knife at the base. The recipe's own allowance of "a few minutes longer, if liked well done" would take it well past that.
- Keeping it whiteSea kale discolours readily. Use a generous volume of water so it returns to the boil quickly, keep the pan uncovered, and add a squeeze of lemon juice if the shoots are already faintly tinged. Tying in bunches, as directed, is not fussiness -- it keeps the fragile tips from breaking up and lets you lift the whole lot out at once.
- The half hour in cold waterThis is to loosen the grit that collects in the leaf bases of a vegetable grown under a covering of soil or sand. Sea kale sold today is usually clean enough that a thorough rinse will do, but any earth left in the crown will make the whole dish taste of it.
- "Melted butter"In a British book of this date, melted butter is a sauce: butter, flour and water or milk cooked to a light coating consistency, not simply butter warmed in a pan. Either that or a plain white sauce was standard. Hollandaise or brown butter both suit sea kale and are the more usual modern accompaniments.
- Salt and waterThe recipe specifies only "a good quantity of boiling water with some salt in it"; about a tablespoon of salt to four litres is a reasonable modern reading rather than anything the book states. Sea kale is faintly bitter and takes salt well; under-salted cooking water leaves it flat.
- Cost and quantityThe basket is not a standard measure, so tenpence cannot be translated into a modern price with any confidence. "Four or five heads" per person most likely means four or five bunched shoots rather than whole plants; roughly 150-200 g of trimmed sea kale a head is a reasonable modern portion as a first course or side.
Sea kale grows wild on the shingle beaches of the British and northern European coasts, where it was gathered long before it was farmed; coastal communities are generally said to have heaped shingle over the emerging shoots in spring to blanch them, which is exactly the technique that later moved into the kitchen garden. It came into deliberate cultivation in the eighteenth century and was promoted as a garden crop by the botanist William Curtis, after which the terracotta forcing pot -- a bell-shaped cover with a lid, set over the crown in winter -- became a fixture of the Victorian walled garden. Its appearance in Cassell's, treated as a routine boiled vegetable with melted butter, marks the point at which sea kale was at its most familiar: a reliable late-winter and early-spring vegetable arriving when little else was in season. It fell out of commercial cultivation in the twentieth century as forcing became uneconomic, and is now a specialist crop sold for a few weeks a year.