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Sea Kale, Stewed
Wash the sea kale, and tie it in bundles. Boil it in salted water for a quarter of an hour, then drain it, and put it into a saucepan with as much brown gravy as will cover it. Stew gently till tender. Lay it in a hot dish, stir a little lemon-juice into the sauce, and pour it over. White sauce or poivrade sauce may, if preferred, be served with sea kale instead of brown sauce. Time to boil, twenty minutes or more, according to condition. Probable cost, sea kale when plentiful, 10d. to 1s. per basket.
A straightforward Victorian vegetable dish whose main difficulty today is finding the vegetable. The cooking itself needs only restraint.
- Total cooking timeThe recipe boils the kale a quarter of an hour and then stews it again in gravy, which will reduce blanched sea kale shoots to threads. Modern practice is 4-6 minutes in boiling salted water until the stems just yield, then a few minutes' gentle warming in the sauce. The note "twenty minutes or more, according to condition" suggests the writer expected stalks tougher than the tender forced shoots sold today.
- SourcingSea kale (Crambe maritima) is grown commercially only in small quantities and appears in late winter and early spring, forced and blanched like rhubarb. Do not gather it from the wild: its coastal colonies are local and easily damaged, and uprooting wild plants without the landowner's permission is an offence.
- SubstitutesTrimmed white asparagus, cardoon ribs or the stems of Swiss chard all take this treatment well, though none matches sea kale's flavour exactly. Adjust blanching time to the vegetable.
- Tying in bundlesWorth doing, as with asparagus. It keeps the fragile blanched shoots from breaking up in the water and lets you lift them all out at once; use soft kitchen string and cut it away before saucing.
- "Brown gravy"In nineteenth-century cookery books this usually means a made brown sauce rather than plain roast drippings: espagnole, or a well-reduced brown stock lightly thickened. A modern reduced veal or beef stock, finished with butter, gives much the same effect without the flour.
- Poivrade sauceA brown sauce with mirepoix, vinegar or wine and a good quantity of crushed peppercorns added at the end and strained. The pepper should be added late, since long boiling makes it harsh.
- Lemon juiceStirred into the sauce off the heat, not simmered in it, as the recipe implies. Acid added at the last moment lifts the sauce; boiled in, it loses its brightness.
- Cost and quantityThe "basket" was a market unit with no fixed weight, so the price note tells you only that sea kale was cheap in season. Reckon about 1 lb of trimmed shoots for two people as a vegetable course.
Sea kale grows wild on the shingle and sand of northern European coasts, where the shoots come up naturally blanched under drifted stones and sand, and coastal gatherers were eating it long before anyone cultivated it. Its move into gardens is generally traced to the late eighteenth century in Britain, when the botanist and apothecary William Curtis, who ran a botanic garden, promoted it as a crop; by the middle of the nineteenth century it was forced under pots in kitchen gardens and sold in London markets as an early spring luxury alongside asparagus and forced rhubarb. Cassell's treats it as an ordinary market vegetable, priced by the basket and served with whichever of the standard sauces the household happened to have going, which is a good measure of how common it once was. It fell out of commercial cultivation in the twentieth century, so a dish that a Victorian cook considered cheap is now a specialist item.