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Some Kitchen Kinks: Kohl-Rabi
Kohl-Rabi, or Turnip Cabbage. - This vegetable is a variety of the cabbage, but instead of the reserve nutritive matter of the plant being stored largely in the leaves or flowers, it is collected in the stem, which forms a turniplike enlargement just above the ground. Kohl-rabi is fine flavored and delicate, if cooked when very young and tender. It should be used when it has a diameter of not more than 2 or 3 inches. As it grows large it becomes tough and fibrous.
Boiled Kohl-Rabi.
Wash and pare the vegetables, then cut in thin slices. Put into slightly salted boiling water and boil, with the cover partially off the stewpan, until the vegetable is tender. This will take from thirty to fifty minutes.
Pour off the water and season with butter, salt, and pepper.
Kohl-rabi may be boiled with pork in the same way as cabbage. The cold boiled vegetable may be served as a salad.
A plain vegetable entry with a workable method attached, though the timing belongs to an era that boiled everything to submission.
- The timing is the thing to fixThirty to fifty minutes will reduce thin slices of kohlrabi to mush. Slices about a quarter-inch thick are tender in roughly 8 to 12 minutes; test with a knife tip rather than a clock.
- Why the lid is offLeaving the pan partly uncovered is usually explained as letting the volatile sulphur compounds released by brassicas escape rather than condensing back into the water. Whatever the mechanism, the instruction is worth keeping.
- Buying by sizeThe advice to stay under 2 or 3 inches across is sound and still the best guide at a market. Larger bulbs, common in supermarkets, need the outer layer pared away generously — often an eighth of an inch or more — because the woodiness sits just under the skin.
- Pare twice if neededKohlrabi has a fibrous layer beneath the papery skin that a vegetable peeler often misses. Take it off with a paring knife; anything that resists the blade will still resist the fork after boiling.
- The leavesThis entry says nothing about them, but the greens are good eating and cook like collards or turnip tops in 5 to 10 minutes. Strip them from the stems if the stems are thick.
- Boiled with porkThe text points back to the cabbage method: simmering the vegetable in the liquid alongside a piece of salt pork or a ham hock. No timing is given for this variation.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Two medium bulbs, roughly a pound trimmed, serve three or four as a side dish.
- As saladCold boiled slices want an acid dressing to come alive — oil and vinegar, or a mustard mayonnaise. Drain them well and dress while barely warm so they take up the seasoning.
Kohlrabi is Brassica oleracea in yet another guise, the same species as cabbage, broccoli and kale, bred so that the swollen stem rather than the leaf or flower head does the storing — which is exactly what this entry explains, and unusually well for a household manual. The name comes from German Kohl (cabbage) together with a second element that reaches German from Italian cavolo rapa and ultimately Latin rapa, turnip, and English-language cookbooks of the period often gloss it as "turnip cabbage" because readers were assumed not to know it. Books like this one tended to treat it as a curiosity requiring introduction rather than a recipe: hence the paragraph of botany before any instruction to put a pan on.