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Bacon and Greens
The middling is generally used for this purpose: cut a piece about a foot square, boil three hours.
Take a good head of cabbage, cut, quarter, and wash clean; press the water out as dry as you can. Boil them one or two hours with half a pod of red pepper; put them on a dish and the middling on top. You can fry the cabbage next day, and make a savory dish, but it does not suit dyspeptics. The thin part of the middling is used for frying, and is called "breakfast bacon."--Mrs. P. W.
A plain boiled dinner of cured pork and cabbage, written for a cook who kept a whole side of bacon hanging in the smokehouse. Two things need translating: what a "middling" is, and how long cabbage should actually cook.
- What a middling isThe middling is the cured, smoked side of the hog the belly and flank, between shoulder and ham. A foot-square piece is a substantial slab, perhaps 3 to 5 lb depending on how thick the side was. A slab of unsliced smoked bacon, salt pork, or a smoked pork hock or shoulder stands in for it; buy it in one piece rather than sliced.
- Soak first, taste laterOld home-cured pork was salted for keeping, not for flavor, and the three-hour boil was partly a leaching operation. Modern commercial bacon is far milder. Taste the water after 30 minutes and change it if it is aggressively salty; do not salt the cabbage until you have tasted the pot liquor.
- Cabbage timingOne to two hours produces the soft, gray, strongly sulfurous cabbage of the period. Quartered cabbage in the simmering pot liquor is done in 15 to 20 minutes, shredded in about 8. If you want the traditional texture, that is a choice, not a requirement.
- Half a pod of red pepperA dried cayenne or similar small hot pepper, split. Half a pod in a large pot is background warmth, not heat. Leave it whole and fish it out rather than chopping it in.
- Press the water outWringing the washed cabbage dry keeps rinse water from diluting the pot. The recipe does not actually say whether the cabbage goes into the pork water or a fresh pot, but cooking it in the salty, smoky pork broth is the usual reading.
- The fried cabbageNext-day cabbage is chopped and fried in bacon fat until the edges brown. Mrs. P. W.'s warning about dyspeptics is period shorthand for rich and hard to digest; it is one of the better uses for leftovers in the book.
- Breakfast baconThe "thin part" she names is the streaky belly end, which is what a modern package of bacon comes from. She is distinguishing the frying cut from the thicker boiling cut of the same side of pork.
- YieldA 3 to 4 lb middling with one head of cabbage serves six to eight as a main course. Save the pot liquor for cornbread or beans.
Bacon and greens was the everyday dinner of Virginia and the wider upland South, eaten so routinely that it became a regional shorthand — nineteenth-century writers and politicians are often said to have invoked it the way others invoked roast beef. The logic is agricultural: hogs were killed in late fall and the sides salted and smoked to last the year, while cabbage, turnip tops, collards and poke came out of the kitchen garden in succession, so a piece of cured pork could carry whatever green was standing. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives credited largely by initials, records dozens of such recipes in the contributors' own compressed voice; the assumption throughout is a household with a smokehouse and a cook who already knows what a middling looks like. The aside about dyspeptics is characteristic of the era's cookbooks, which routinely graded dishes by their supposed digestibility.