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Vegetables: Kale
Kale Boiled with Pork.
Cook kale the same as cabbage with pork.
Minced Kale (Scotch recipe).
Remove old or tough leaves. Wash the kale thoroughly and drain; then put to cook in a kettle of boiling water to which has been added 1 tablespoonful salt to 4 quarts water.
Boil rapidly till tender. Pour off the water, and chop the kale fine; put back into the kettle, add 1 tablespoonful butter and 2 tablespoonfuls meat broth for each pint minced vegetable. Cook ten minutes, and serve at once. The time required for cooking kale varies from thirty to fifty minutes.
Two short methods, one of them essentially a note. The second is a workable dish, though the cooking times belong to an era of coarser, older kale.
- Cooking timeThirty to fifty minutes suits mature, thick-stemmed field kale. Modern curly kale is usually tender in around 8-12 minutes and lacinato sooner; taste a leaf rather than watching the clock.
- Salt ratioOne tablespoon to 4 quarts is a light hand by current standards for greens. Boiling rapidly in generous salted water is the right approach, but season more assertively if you want the kale to taste of anything without added butter.
- Strip the stems"Old or tough leaves" removed is only half the job. Pull the leaves off the central ribs entirely; ribs need roughly twice as long as the leaf and will stay stringy through chopping.
- Meat brothTwo tablespoonfuls per pint of chopped kale is a small amount, meant to moisten and enrich rather than make a sauce. Any well-flavoured stock works.
- The ten-minute finishAfter the initial boil the kale is already cooked, so this second stage is only to marry the butter and broth. Keep the heat low and the pan covered so the greens do not scorch or dry out.
- Squeeze before choppingBoiled kale holds a surprising amount of water. Press it firmly in the colander before chopping, or the butter and broth will simply thin out into the pan.
- "Same as cabbage with pork"The cross-reference presumably points to boiling the greens with a piece of salt pork or bacon in the water. Kale takes to it well, and the pork would supply seasoning in place of the plain salted water and broth of the second recipe.
- YieldA large bunch of kale, about 12 oz trimmed, cooks down to something in the region of a pint chopped, enough for two or three as a side.
Kale was a staple green of Scotland long before it was a fashionable one elsewhere: the word kail did double duty for the plant, for broth, and by extension for dinner itself, and a kailyard was the kitchen garden behind the cottage. Chopped or "minced" kail dressed with butter and a little stock is the plain domestic form of that tradition, close cousin to the kale served with mashed potato or oatmeal in various regional dishes. Its appearance in a household compendium of this period reflects kale's practical virtue rather than any glamour: it stands hard frost, keeps producing after other greens have finished, and was commonly said to improve in flavour once it had been frosted. Books of this kind tend to treat it as an appendix to cabbage.