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Baked Cabbage and Bacon
Shred or chop coarse three pounds of cabbage. Stir into it a tablespoon of flour, a teaspoon of salt, the same of sifted dry mustard, a little paprika and half a cup of water. Put into a granite baking dish, lay over the top six thin slices of lean bacon, and cover tight.
Bake in a hot oven an hour in summer time, longer in winter. If it does not brown with the cover on, remove for a few minutes. The bacon is nice, however, if a thin tin is used for cover and not removed.
A one-dish steam-bake that relies on cabbage releasing its own moisture under a tight cover. Two details in the original need translating: the oven and the vessel.
- "A hot oven"Period sources generally gloss a hot oven as somewhere around 400-450F, though the book gives no figure. Covered tightly with only half a cup of water, three pounds of cabbage will steam rather than scorch at that heat, but 400F gives you more margin if your dish is shallow or your lid imperfect.
- Granite baking dishGraniteware — enameled sheet steel, speckled grey — not stone or granite. Any heavy covered casserole or Dutch oven does the same job. The point is a vessel that seals.
- The tight cover is the recipeWith so little added liquid, cabbage cooks in its own steam. A loose lid dries it out and the flour scorches. If your lid rattles, seal the rim with foil before putting the lid on.
- "Longer in winter"Most likely a reference to storage cabbage, which by midwinter is denser, drier and tougher than a summer head, though the book does not say. Judge by the cabbage, not the clock: it is done when a knife slides through the centre with no resistance.
- The flourA single tablespoon tossed through three pounds of cabbage is there to bind the released juices into a light sauce, not to thicken a gravy. Toss it with the dry cabbage before adding water so it does not clump.
- Sifted dry mustardPowdered mustard, such as Colman's — not prepared mustard from a jar. Sifting matters because the powder cakes and a lump of it in one bite is unpleasant.
- The baconSix thin slices of lean bacon over three pounds of cabbage is seasoning, not a topping. Much modern supermarket bacon is wet-cured and often sugared; a dry-cured slab bacon or pancetta behaves closer to the original and renders instead of steaming grey.
- BrowningThe note about a "thin tin used for cover" means the bacon steams pale but stays tender and its fat flavours the whole dish. If you want it crisp, take the cover off for the last ten minutes and expect the top layer of cabbage to catch a little colour too.
- YieldThree pounds of cabbage cooks down to serve six as a side, or four as a supper dish with bread and potatoes.
Cabbage baked under salt pork or bacon is one of the oldest ways of making a cheap, bulky vegetable into a meal, common across northern Europe and carried into American and British household cooking wherever cabbage kept well through winter, that is to say almost everywhere with a cellar. What marks this version as turn-of-the-century household-magazine cooking rather than folk practice is the dry mustard and paprika: paprika is often said to have become fashionable in English-language cookbooks around the turn of the century, often used, as here, for colour and a faint warmth in pale dishes. The instruction to bake longer in winter is a reminder that recipes were written for a food supply with seasons in it; the same cook buying the same cabbage in February was handling a genuinely different vegetable, and the book expects her to know it.