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Baked Cabbage
2 heaping tablespoonfuls 2 eggs chopped cooked bacon Salt and pepper 2 tablespoonfuls milk 1 tablespoonful butter Trim the cabbage and boil it till tender in plenty of boiling salted water. Press out all the moisture, chop it fine, and press it again.
Now add the butter, milk, bacon, seasonings, and the eggs well beaten.
The text as printed has lost both the cabbage itself and the final step, which is a common casualty of columnar ingredient lists in early twentieth-century books. What survives is a bound cabbage custard, and it needs to be read that way.
- The missing ingredientThe quantity column has dropped the cabbage. Work from one medium firm head, roughly 2 lb trimmed, which should yield something like 3 cups once boiled, drained and chopped. The "2 heaping tablespoonfuls" most likely belongs to the chopped cooked bacon on the same line.
- The missing stepNothing in the surviving text tells you to bake it, yet the recipe is titled Baked Cabbage and sits in a book about casserole cookery. Turn the mixture into a buttered casserole and bake at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes, until the egg is set and the top lightly coloured.
- "Casserole" in this bookHere the casserole is the vessel: a lidded earthenware or fireproof china dish that went from oven to table. Any modern 1-quart baking dish stands in, uncovered here so the surface dries and browns.
- The hinge is drynessTwo pressings are specified for a reason. Cabbage holds an enormous amount of water, and any that remains will weep out and curdle the egg into a grey puddle. Press in a sieve, chop, then press again in a clean towel until it feels almost dry.
- Boiling time"Till tender in plenty of boiling salted water" would have allowed a long boil. Here the cabbage is boiled before it is chopped, so cook it in wedges only until just tender rather than to collapse; overlong boiling is what develops the sulphurous smell that gave boiled cabbage its reputation.
- Eggs and proportionTwo eggs and 2 tablespoons of milk to 3 cups of cabbage is a light binding, not a quiche filling. Beat the eggs thoroughly and fold them into cabbage that has cooled to warm, or they will begin to scramble before the dish reaches the oven.
- BaconBacon of this period was often saltier and more heavily smoked than much supermarket bacon. Taste before you add salt, and render the bacon crisp so its fat carries some flavour into the cabbage.
- YieldProbably four as a side dish, or two as a light supper with bread. It is best straight from the oven; reheated, the egg tightens and the cabbage goes watery.
Cabbage bound with egg and baked belongs to a broad family of vegetable timbales and "scallops" that filled the vegetable chapters of English and American cookbooks either side of 1900, when the aim was to make a cheap, plentiful vegetable respectable at a middle-class table. Books of this kind were also selling a piece of equipment: the fireproof earthenware casserole, newly affordable and, by many accounts, much promoted around this period as a way to cook and serve in the same dish, saving both fuel and washing up. The technique here is a small lesson in that economy, taking boiled cabbage and a couple of spoonfuls of bacon and turning them into a dish that could be carried to the table on its own. The garbled ingredient column is itself characteristic of the period, when such lists were often said to have been set in narrow columns and quantities were easily separated from the things they measured.