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Kale, Sea, Stewed in Gravy
Wash and trim the kale, and tie it in small bunches. Put it into boiling salt and water, and let it boil softly for six or eight minutes; then take it out, drain it, and put it into a saucepan, with as much good brown gravy as will cover it. Let it remain until tender, and serve with the gravy in which it was stewed poured over it. Probable cost of kale, 10d. or more per basket. Sufficient, one basket for four or five persons.
A short Victorian side dish that depends entirely on two things: not overcooking the stems, and having a decent brown gravy on hand. Both are worth attention before you start.
- What sea kale isSea kale is Crambe maritima, grown for its blanched ivory leaf-stalks, not the curly green brassica sold as kale today. It is a specialist vegetable now, in season roughly January to March; if you cannot find it, forced chicory, cardoon or the thick white ribs of Swiss chard behave similarly, and asparagus is the traditional stand-in for the flavour.
- The hinge: keep the blanching briefSix to eight minutes in salted water is right for slim stems and no longer. Sea kale collapses into strings once it goes past tender, and it then has to sit in the gravy as well. Pull it while there is still slight resistance and let the second stage finish it.
- The second stew is short too"Let it remain until tender" probably means only a few minutes at a bare simmer in the gravy rather than a long braise; the stems are already part-cooked. Test with a knife tip at the thickest part of a stalk.
- Good brown gravyA meat-based brown sauce or reduced stock rather than a floury gravy is what suits the dish; reduced beef or veal stock with a little butter whisked in at the end gives a glossy coating. The recipe asks only for as much as will cover the kale.
- Tying in bunchesNot decorative. The stalks are brittle and the bundles let you lift them out of the water whole and drain them without breakage. Cut the string before saucing.
- Keeping it paleSea kale discolours in cooking water. A squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of vinegar in the blanching water helps hold the white, though it will inevitably darken once it meets brown gravy.
- "A basket" is not a usable measureBasket sizes were not standardised, so the 10d. figure tells you nothing convertible. Work instead from the stated yield: one basket serving four or five, which suggests something on the order of a pound or two of trimmed stems.
Sea kale grows wild on the shingle beaches of Britain and northern Europe, where coastal families long gathered the pale shoots pushing up through the pebbles; the stones themselves did the blanching. It was brought into gardens in the eighteenth century, and the botanist William Curtis is generally credited with popularising its cultivation in England around the turn of the nineteenth century, after which growers forced it in the dark under clay pots to reproduce the tender white stalks of the wild plant. That gardener's vegetable is what Cassell's is addressing: a genteel late-winter delicacy that appeared before asparagus and was treated much the same way, either buttered or, as here, stewed in brown gravy. Uprooting wild plants is restricted in the UK, so any sea kale you cook today should be a cultivated one.