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Sea Kale, Boiled
When fresh and delicately cooked, sea kale resembles and will serve a substitute for asparagus. Carefully wash and brush the sea kale to remove the sand and grit, cut out the black part of the roots, and tie the shoots in small bundles. Throw these into plenty of boiling water slightly salted, and keep them boiling quickly until tender. Take them up, drain them, untie the bunches, and serve the kale on toast, with all the heads in one direction, and with plain melted butter or white sauce poured over it, or, if preferred, without the toast, and dry. If required to be served on toast, the latter may be soaked in the water in which the kale was cooked, that is provided the liquor remains colourless; otherwise it will impart a bitter taste to the toast. Time--the better the kale is, the quicker it will be done; if young and fresh, it will be done enough in from twenty to thirty minutes; if stale and discoloured, it will need from forty to fifty minutes. If there is any suspicion that the kale is stale, the water should be poured off when it is half done, and fresh water substituted. Probable cost when plentiful, 10d. to 1s. per basket. Sufficient, twelve heads for three or four persons.
A straightforward boiled vegetable, but the timing here belongs to an era when sea kale reached the kitchen after a long journey and was often past its best. Modern blanched sea kale needs a fraction of the time given.
- Cut the time hardTwenty to thirty minutes will reduce fresh sea kale to grey threads. Forced, blanched shoots are tender in 4-8 minutes in boiling salted water, depending on thickness; test the thick end of a stem with a knife tip and lift them out the moment it slides in.
- Finding sea kaleCrambe maritima is a winter forced crop, sold in a few greengrocers and by specialist growers between January and March. Wild sea kale on the coast is scarce, and uprooting any wild plant without the landowner's permission is an offence in Britain; it is best left alone. Blanched chicory stems or thick asparagus stand in reasonably well.
- "Plain melted butter"In Victorian usage this is not simply butter melted in a pan but the standard butter sauce: a thin flour-and-butter roux let down with water or stock, finished with more butter. Plain hot butter with lemon works and is lighter.
- Tie the bundles looselySea kale stems bruise easily and the tips are the best part. Tie with cotton string just tight enough to hold, and lower the bundles in rather than throwing them, so the heads stay intact for the arrangement on the toast.
- Drain thoroughlyThe stems hold a surprising amount of water between their layers. Stand the bundles upright in a colander for a minute before serving, or the sauce will slide off and the toast will collapse.
- The bitterness testThe instruction about colourless cooking liquor is sound guidance for judging quality: bitter, discoloured water means the shoots have greened and toughened in storage. Changing the water halfway masks the problem rather than fixing it.
- Cost and yieldThe price is in pre-decimal pence and shillings and has no useful modern equivalent. Twelve heads for three or four people still holds; reckon on 6-8 oz trimmed weight per person as a side dish.
Sea kale grows wild on shingle beaches around the coasts of Britain and northern Europe, where it was gathered long before anyone cultivated it; coastal dwellers are generally said to have banked shingle over the crowns in winter to draw up pale, tender shoots. It entered gardens in the later eighteenth century, and by the nineteenth was forced in the dark under terracotta sea kale pots, which is why Victorian cookery books treat it as a luxury of the late winter and early spring table, arriving just as the last of the stored roots grew tiresome and well before asparagus. Cassell's comparison to asparagus is the standard one of the period, and it explains the serving style: the same toast, the same butter sauce, the same insistence on laying the heads all one way in the dish. Commercial forcing largely died out in the twentieth century, which is why a vegetable once common enough to be priced by the basket is now something of a specialist item.