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Colcannon
6 cupfuls boiled cabbage Salt and pepper to taste 3 cupfuls mashed potatoes 1/2 pint (I cup) milk 3 ozs. (3 heaping tablespoonfuls) butter Mix the cabbage, potatoes, half of the butter, milk, and the salt and pepper together with a fork.
Put the mixture into a buttered earthenware baking dish, place the rest of the butter on the top, and bake for three-quarters of an hour in a fairly hot oven.
Serve hot, alone or with meat of any kind. 12 ears sweet corn
A plain baked colcannon that assumes you already have leftover cabbage and mashed potato on hand. Two things need attention before you start: the cabbage must be squeezed dry, and the last line of the recipe does not belong to it.
- The stray line"12 ears sweet corn" is a typesetting spill from the recipe that follows on the page. It has nothing to do with colcannon; ignore it.
- Drain the cabbage hardSix cupfuls of boiled cabbage carries a great deal of water, and wet cabbage turns the whole dish into a loose grey mash. Press it in a colander or wring it in a towel, then chop it fairly fine before mixing.
- Oven temperatureA "fairly hot" oven in books of this period is usually read as somewhere around 375-400F. Three-quarters of an hour at that heat, with the dish left uncovered, should give the browned, buttery top the butter-dotting implies.
- The half pintIn this book a half pint is given as one cup, so use 8 fl oz. If your potatoes were already mashed with milk or cream, add the liquid gradually — the mixture should hold a soft peak, not pour.
- Butter3 oz is about 6 level tablespoons; the original's "3 heaping tablespoonfuls" is its own way of reaching roughly the same quantity, since a heaping spoon holds well over a level one. Weigh it if you can. Half goes into the mixture, half dots the top.
- VesselAn earthenware baking dish of about two and a half quarts will hold it comfortably. Butter it well; potato sticks, and the crust is the point.
- Mix with a forkWorth following. Beating the mixture smooth makes it gluey; a fork keeps the cabbage in visible strands through the potato.
- YieldAbout nine cupfuls of mixture, which serves six to eight as a side dish or four as a supper on its own.
Colcannon is an Irish dish whose name is generally traced to the Irish cál ceannann, roughly "white-headed cabbage" — pale potato shot through with green. In Ireland it was long tied to Hallowe'en, when rings, coins and thimbles were hidden in the bowl as fortune-telling tokens, and it is usually made on the stovetop with kale or cabbage, potato, butter and scallion or leek. What appears here is the dish rerouted through the casserole book, where a housekeeper might see how yesterday's boiled vegetables could go into an earthenware dish, take a browned top in the oven, and arrive at table looking like a made dish rather than leftovers. The absence of any onion or leek, and the reliance on cabbage already boiled, mark this as an economy recipe first and a national dish second.