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Some Kitchen Kinks: Kale
Kale Boiled with Pork. - Cook the kale the same as cabbage with pork.
Minced Kale. - Remove all the old or tough leaves. Wash the kale thoroughly and drain, then put on to cook in a kettle of boiling water, to which has been added salt in the proportion of 1 tablespoonful to 4 quarts of water. Boil rapidly, with the cover off the kettle, until the vegetable is tender. Pour off the water, and chop the kale rather fine; then put back into the kettle and add 1 tablespoonful of butter and 2 of meat broth or water for each pint of the minced vegetable. Add more salt if required. Cook for ten minutes and serve at once. The time required for cooking kale varies from thirty to fifty minutes. If young and fresh from the garden it will cook in thirty minutes.
Sea Kale. This is delicious a spring vegetable. It requires practically the same culture as asparagus, and the young shoots are cooked in the same way as this vegetable. Sea kale may be cut the third year from the planting of the seed. Cutting should not be continued after the flower heads begin to form. The flower heads may be cooked the same as broccoli.
The method is sound, but the timings belong to an era of tough, overwintered field kale. Modern bunched kale from a shop needs a fraction of the time given here.
- Cut the boiling time hardThirty to fifty minutes will reduce today's curly or lacinato kale to olive-drab mush. Trimmed leaves are tender in 5 to 10 minutes in boiling water; thick mature stems, if you keep them, want a few minutes' head start.
- Lid off is deliberateLeaving the kettle uncovered lets volatile sulphur compounds escape rather than condensing back into the pot, which keeps both flavour and colour better. Keep the water at a hard boil, not a simmer.
- Salt proportionOne tablespoon to 4 quarts is about 1 tablespoon per 4 litres, which is on the light side by current practice. Salting more generously seasons the leaves from the inside and needs less correction later.
- Meat brothMeans ordinary stock; the recipe itself offers water as the alternative. Any unsalted chicken or vegetable stock does the job; the two tablespoons per pint are there for moisture and savour, not to make a sauce.
- "For each pint of the minced vegetable"Measure after chopping, by volume, loosely packed. A pint is 2 cups, so roughly a tablespoon of butter and two of stock per 2 cups of chopped kale.
- The final ten minutesWith modern kale, five minutes over low heat is enough to warm the butter through and let the leaves absorb the stock. Longer only drives off what colour is left.
- Kale boiled with porkThe instruction points back to the book's cabbage-with-pork method, which is not given here; it presumably involves cooking the greens with a piece of salt pork or bacon. Taste before adding any salt at all in that version.
- Sea kaleCrambe maritima is a different plant entirely, blanched under pots for pale shoots and now rare outside specialist growers and a few coastal gardens. The text says only to cook the young shoots as asparagus; in practice that means brief cooking in salted water, on the order of five to eight minutes.
- YieldA large bunch of kale, about 8 to 10 oz trimmed, cooks down to roughly a cup of chopped kale and serves two as a side dish.
Kale was the workhorse brassica of the northern kitchen garden long before it was fashionable: hardy, frost-sweetened, and often the only green standing in February, which is why household manuals of this period treat it as a plain boiled vegetable rather than something to be fussed over. The pairing with pork is the older and more universal treatment, found from Scotland to the German Grünkohl feasts to the greens-and-pot-liquor tradition of the American South, all of them using fat and salt meat to make a coarse leaf palatable. The long boiling times recorded here are honest reporting rather than carelessness, since garden kale left standing through winter develops fibrous ribs that genuinely need it. Sea kale, appended at the end, belonged to a different world altogether: a wild coastal plant brought into cultivation in Britain in the later eighteenth century, forced and blanched under terracotta pots for the gentry's spring table, and later largely forgotten.