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Borecole or Kale
Wash half a peck of kale thoroughly in cold water, changing the water as it becomes clouded, then pick over carefully, cut off the roots, wash again, drain by picking up in handfuls and shaking. Put this into a kettle with one pint of boiling water, stand over the fire and cook for thirty minutes; do not cover the kettle. Then drain in a colander, turn into a chopping tray and chop fine; it cannot be too fine. Put into a small saucepan, add two tablespoonfuls of cream, one tablespoonful of butter and a palatable seasoning of salt and pepper, stir over the fire until very hot. Serve on a heated dish, garnished with squares of buttered toast.
A plain creamed kale, cooked hard and chopped to a purée-like fineness in the manner of nineteenth-century greens cookery. Two things need adjusting: the quantity, which is given in dry measure, and the cooking time.
- Half a peckA peck is 8 dry quarts, so half a peck is 4 quarts of loosely packed leaves — roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of untrimmed kale, which is one or two large supermarket bunches. Cooked and chopped it makes a few cupfuls, enough for about four as a side dish.
- Thirty minutes is too longCurly kale from a modern market is younger and more tender than field kale cut after frost. Five to ten minutes in the boiling water brings it to tenderness; half an hour turns it grey and flat-tasting. Test a leaf rather than the clock.
- One pint of waterTwo cups is not enough to cover the greens, and that is intentional — the kale steams down in its own moisture rather than swimming in water. Use a wide kettle so the leaves collapse evenly, and add a splash more if it threatens to catch.
- Leave the lid offThe instruction is deliberate; the recipe says so explicitly. The usual explanation is that covering the pan holds in the volatile sulphur compounds released by brassicas, dulling colour and smell. Whatever the mechanism, an open pan remains the common practice.
- Chopping trayA wooden trough used with a rocking crescent blade. A food processor pulsed a few times does the same work, but stop short of a purée — the recipe wants fine, not smooth.
- Cream and butterTwo tablespoons of cream for this much kale is a gloss, not a sauce. Heavy cream holds up best; anything lighter may break as it heats in the pan. Reheat only until steaming.
- The toast garnishButtered toast cut into small squares, as the recipe specifies. Cut and butter it while the kale reheats so it goes to the table crisp.
"Borecole" comes into English from the Dutch boerenkool, literally peasant's cabbage, and by the nineteenth century it appeared in seed catalogues and cookbooks alongside the names kale and curly greens. It was a poor man's winter vegetable in northern Europe and in American kitchen gardens because it stands hard frost, and is often said to sweeten after a freeze \— a claim borne out by the plant's habit of converting starch to sugar in cold weather. Cookery writers of this period treated all greens much alike: boil hard, drain, chop very fine, then enrich with butter and cream and serve on toast, a formula applied equally to spinach, beet tops, dandelion and kale.