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To Boil Cabbage with Bacon
Quarter a head of hard white cabbage, examine for insects, lay in salt and water several hours. An hour before dinner, drain and put in a pot in which bacon has been boiling--a pod of red pepper boiled with it will make it more wholesome and improve the flavor of both bacon and cabbage.--Mrs. S. T.
A one-pot Southern side that depends entirely on the bacon pot liquor it is cooked in. The instruction that matters is the pot: this is cabbage boiled in the water a piece of salt-cured side meat has already simmered in, not cabbage boiled in plain water with bacon added.
- What "bacon" means hereIn this period bacon generally means a slab of cured, unsliced side meat or streak-o'-lean, boiled long enough to produce a salty broth. Modern breakfast bacon will not do it; use a smoked ham hock, salt pork, or a piece of slab bacon simmered until tender, and cook the cabbage in that liquid.
- The salt-and-water soakSeveral hours in cold salted water was an insect-removal step for garden cabbage, not a seasoning or brining one. With supermarket cabbage a rinse and a look between the outer leaves is enough; a 20-minute soak does no harm if the head came from a garden or market stall.
- "An hour before dinner"Quartered cabbage in simmering pot liquor is tender in 20 to 30 minutes, and pleasantly soft at 40. The full hour gives the very collapsed, silky texture the period expected; pull it earlier if you want the quarters to hold their shape.
- The pod of red pepperOne small dried hot pepper, left whole. It perfumes the pot rather than making it hot, and it can be fished out before serving. The claim that it makes the dish "more wholesome" is period digestive lore, not nutrition.
- SaltAdd none until the end. Cured pork liquor is often salty enough on its own, and it concentrates as the pot reduces.
- Yield and servingA hard white head of about 2 lb, quartered, serves four to six as a side. Serve the quarters with a ladle of the pot liquor and the sliced meat alongside; cornbread for the broth is a common accompaniment.
Cabbage boiled in the pot with cured pork is one of the oldest and most persistent dishes in the American South, and it runs parallel to the British and Irish practice of cooking greens in the bacon kettle rather than wasting the fat and salt in the water. *Housekeeping in Old Virginia*, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from some two hundred and fifty Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries carry initials like "Mrs. S. T." instead of full names; the brevity here assumes a reader who already has a pot of bacon on the fire. The red pepper pod is often said to reflect a nineteenth-century belief that capsicum corrected the "windiness" of the cabbage family, a piece of household medicine that outlived its theory and survives simply because it tastes right.