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Fried Cabbage
Reserve some cabbage from dinner. Set it away till next morning. Chop fine, season with pepper and salt, and fry brown with a slice of fat bacon.
A leftovers dish with almost no measurements, which is the point: it assumes yesterday's boiled cabbage and a piece of side meat already in the house. A few things are worth pinning down.
- Start with drained, dry cabbageThe hinge is moisture. Boiled cabbage left overnight holds a lot of water, and wet cabbage steams instead of browning. Press it in a colander or squeeze it in a towel before chopping.
- "A slice of fat bacon"This means fatback or streaky salt pork, not modern thin-cut breakfast bacon. Render one or two ounces over medium heat until the fat runs and the piece is crisp, then fry the cabbage in the fat; the meat can be chopped back in or discarded.
- Heat and panCast iron over medium-high. Spread the cabbage out, leave it alone for a few minutes to take colour, then turn. Constant stirring gives you grey cabbage.
- Overnight restThe wait is simply a consequence of the dish being yesterday's dinner; cold cabbage also tends to hold together better under the knife than warm. Refrigerate it; a cool larder is not the same thing as 40F.
- SeasoningSalt cautiously. Cabbage boiled with pork or bacon, as it often was, is already salty, and the frying fat adds more. The recipe seasons before frying; taste before adding more.
- YieldNo quantity is given. As a guide, about two cups of cooked cabbage will serve two as a breakfast or supper side; it scales directly.
Frying yesterday's boiled greens in pork fat is one of the oldest economies in Anglo-American cooking — the same impulse behind English bubble and squeak, which in its earliest recorded form paired cabbage with leftover beef; the potato version is the later, familiar one. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, is full of these short entries that assume a household cooking daily from a standing supply of salt pork and garden vegetables, with nothing thrown out. Cabbage kept well through a Virginia winter in a root cellar or buried clamp, so it appeared at dinner constantly, and a second appearance at breakfast the next morning needed no more instruction than this.