Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sausages and Cabbage
Sausages and Cabbage
Cut off the outer leaves and the hard stalk from a fine-hearted savoy or cabbage, and carefully cleanse it from all impurities. Slice it finely, as if it were to be pickled, rinse it well, and put it into a saucepan with as much boiling (unsalted) water as will barely cover it. Let it boil till quite tender, stirring occasionally to keep it from burning to the bottom of the saucepan. Add a little more water if necessary, but be sparing in putting this in. When the cabbage is tender, there ought to be in the pan as much liquor only as will moisten the vegetable. Lay a pound or more of fresh sausages in the centre of the cooked cabbage, cover the saucepan closely to keep in the heat and vapour, and stew the sausage gently until done enough. Lift it out, lay it on a round of toast in a hot dish, strain the liquor in the pan over it and the toast, and serve the cabbage neatly piled on a separate dish. If there are any remains when the dish is taken from the table, they may be heated again in the same way, and sent to table a second time. Supposing that the cabbage only is left, it may be heated, put on a dish with poached eggs, accompanied by an equal number of slices of toasted bacon laid upon it. Time to stew the sausages, thirty to forty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A one-pot supper that uses the cabbage as both vegetable and cooking medium for the sausages. The only part that needs real adjustment is the sausage timing.
- Sausage timingThirty to forty minutes suits thicker, coarser sausages of the kind probably meant here. Modern links of ordinary thickness are done in 15-20 minutes of gentle stewing; take them to 160-165F (71-74C) at the centre and stop there, or the casings split and the filling turns dry and grainy.
- Unsalted water is deliberateThe recipe puts the word in brackets. The sausages and their fat add seasoning as they stew, so salt the finished cabbage at the end, after tasting.
- Cabbage choiceA savoy — crinkled leaves, loose dark head — holds its texture better than smooth white cabbage. Slice it as finely as for coleslaw, which is what "as if it were to be pickled" means.
- Water levelBarely covering is the point. Finish with only as much liquor as will moisten the cabbage, as the recipe says; that reduced liquor plus the sausage fat is the sauce that gets poured over the toast.
- Don't brown the sausages firstThey are meant to steam in the cabbage vapour with the lid tight, which is why the pan must be covered closely. If you want colour, sear them briefly in a dry pan and shorten the stewing accordingly.
- Cost and yield1s. 6d. is a late-Victorian shilling and sixpence, a plain weekday figure. It serves three to four; a pound of sausages is four to six links depending on size.
- The leftovers noteThe suggested second appearance — reheated cabbage with poached eggs and toasted bacon — works well as a dish in its own right. Reheat the cabbage in a hot pan rather than a saucepan of water so it dries out a little.
Cabbage stewed with sausage runs through the cooking of northern Europe, from Alsatian and German preparations to the Irish and English boiled-dinner tradition, and the pairing is practical rather than fashionable: the fat and salt of the sausage season an otherwise watery vegetable, and one pan feeds a household. Cassell's, first issued in the 1870s and reissued in expanded form around the turn of the century, was aimed squarely at the middle-class kitchen keeping an eye on the housekeeping book, which explains the "probable cost" that closes almost every entry and the careful instruction on serving the remains a second day. The savoy specified here was the standard winter cabbage of the British market garden, cut after the first frosts, and the round of toast under the meat is the older English habit of using bread to catch juices in place of a made sauce.