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Boiled Cabbage
Select a heavy, white head of cabbage, remove the outside leaves, cut into quarters and, if the head is large, again into eighths. Soak in cold water one hour, drain, cover with boiling water, let stand fifteen minutes or until cool. Press out this water gently and put the cabbage in a kettle nearly filled with boiling water; the cabbage must be covered or the odor will penetrate the entire house. Add a teaspoonful of salt and a small piece of Chili pepper; cover, and boil three-quarters of an hour. If the cabbage is old, it may perhaps require one hour's boiling. The first scalding and the Chili pepper are supposed to diminish the unpleasant odor usually thrown off; this we know if the directions are carefully followed, cabbage may be cooked until thoroughly done, without the slightest odor in the house. When the cabbage is done, drain and serve with Drawn Butter or Cream Sauce.
The method here is built entirely around suppressing cabbage odor, and the long boil that results is the one thing worth changing. Everything else translates directly.
- The boiling timeThree-quarters of an hour to an hour will reduce quartered cabbage to grey pulp. Wedges are done in 8 to 12 minutes in salted boiling water, tender at the core but still holding their shape; shredded cabbage needs 4 to 6.
- Why long boiling smellsThe odor the recipe fights comes from sulfur compounds, including hydrogen sulfide, released as the cabbage cooks, and the amount released increases the longer it is boiled. Short cooking in a generous volume of water largely avoids the problem the scalding and chili were meant to mask.
- The preliminary soak and scaldThe hour in cold water was probably to draw out insects from field-grown heads and to freshen a limp head; the recipe does not say. With a supermarket head, neither soak nor the fifteen-minute scald is necessary, and the scald in particular costs texture.
- "A small piece of Chili pepper"Most likely a piece of a dried red pepper pod rather than chili powder or a fresh chile. The recipe uses it as a deodorizer rather than for heat, and it can be left out with no loss.
- KettleIn this period a kettle is any large pot, not a spouted tea kettle. Use your largest pot and plenty of water so the temperature does not drop when the cabbage goes in.
- Keeping it coveredThe instruction to keep the lid on is for the household, not the cabbage. Uncovered boiling actually lets sulfur compounds escape rather than condense back into the water, so if smell is not your chief concern, leave the lid off and drain promptly.
- Drawn butterNot simply melted butter. Drawn butter in this era is a light sauce of butter, flour and hot water or stock, seasoned with salt; period proportions run to roughly two tablespoons butter and one of flour to a cup of liquid.
- YieldAn average 2 lb head serves four as a side dish. Drain thoroughly and press gently, or the sauce will slide off.
American cookbooks of the late nineteenth century treat cabbage as a vegetable under suspicion, and the suspicion is largely about smell: it was cheap, it stored through the winter in cellars and barrels, and it announced itself through the whole house. Deodorizing tricks turn up repeatedly in cabbage entries of the 1880s and 1890s -- a preliminary scald, a crust of bread in the pot, a piece of red pepper, a lump of charcoal in the water -- and these address the symptom rather than the cause, an hour at a rolling boil. The chemistry was not understood at the time; what the writer here reports is a kitchen observation that the scalding water carries off some of the offending compounds before the real cooking begins. The pairing with drawn butter or cream sauce is also of its period, when plainly boiled vegetables were commonly sent to table under a flour-thickened sauce rather than dressed with butter and pepper.