Home › Vegetables › Creamed Cabbage
Creamed Cabbage
Thoroughly cleanse two young cabbages, and boil them until quite soft. Take them out, drain, and press them between two hot plates until they are dry, when they may be slightly chopped. Melt a piece of butter the size of an egg in a stewpan, add pepper and salt, then put in the cabbage, and turn it about for two or three minutes. When it is thoroughly heated, dredge 1 tablespoonful of flour over it, and mix with it very gradually a cupful of milk or cream. Serve on a hot dish. Time, half an hour. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A plain white-sauce cabbage built in the pan rather than in a separate saucepan of béchamel. The one thing to get right is the flour: dredge it over hot buttered cabbage and let it cook a moment before any milk goes in, or the finished dish tastes of raw paste.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. That is generous for two small cabbages but it is also the fat that carries the flour, so do not cut it much below 3 tablespoons.
- Two young cabbages"Young" here likely means small, loosely headed cabbages, perhaps around 1 lb each. One modern green or Savoy head of about 2 lb is a reasonable substitute; a dense white cabbage will need longer cooking and gives a coarser result.
- Boil until quite softModern practice stops well short of this. Eight to ten minutes in well-salted water gives cabbage that still has body; twenty minutes gives the grey, sulphurous version this recipe was written around. Cook to the texture you want, not to the word "soft".
- Pressing between hot platesA real and useful step, not a period quirk. Wet cabbage will thin the sauce to soup. Drain hard in a colander, press with the back of a spoon or wring it in a clean towel, and keep it warm while you melt the butter.
- A cupful of milk or creamRead as roughly 8 fl oz; "cupful" was not a standardised measure at the time. Added gradually to 4 tablespoons butter and 1 tablespoon flour it makes a loose coating sauce; if you want it thicker, use 2 tablespoons flour rather than less milk, since the cabbage will release a little liquid as it stands.
- Heat only, do not boil hardOnce the milk is in, bring it just to a simmer and stir until it thickens, a minute or two. Prolonged boiling with the cabbage already cooked will break the vegetable down and can catch the flour on the pan bottom.
- Timing and yield"Time, half an hour" covers the boiling as well as the finishing. Reckon on 20 minutes in total with modern cooking times. Three to four side-dish portions, as stated; season firmly, as cabbage and white sauce both absorb a lot of salt.
Creamed vegetables of this kind are the household application of a French white sauce, and here the flour is dredged straight onto the buttered vegetable in the pan instead of being made up as a separate béchamel and poured over. Compendium cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried a whole family of these entries — creamed onions, creamed celery, creamed potatoes. The instruction to press the cabbage between two hot plates suits a period when cabbage was boiled longer than we boil it now and came out waterlogged, and it survives in modern kitchens as the sensible habit of wringing greens dry before saucing them.