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Charleston Cabbage (I head of cabbage)
I head of cabbage, 4 tablespoonfuls of vinegar, 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls of olive oil, 1/2 pint of cream, 1 egg, Salt and pepper to taste.
Select a hard head of cabbage, cut it into halves, then into eighths; put into a kettle of boiling, salted water, boil twenty minutes, drain. While it is boiling beat the egg until well mixed, add to it the cream. Put the vinegar, sugar, salt, pepper and oil into the saucepan, bring to boiling point, add the egg and cream, mix thoroughly, add the cabbage, cook one moment and serve very hot.
A hot cabbage dish dressed with a sweet-sour custard sauce — essentially a cooked slaw. The sauce is the whole point, and it is fragile.
- Do not let the sauce boilOnce the beaten egg and cream go into the hot vinegar mixture, the pan must stay below a simmer. Boiling curdles it into scrambled egg in vinegar; keep the heat low and stir constantly until it just thickens.
- Half a pint of creamOne cup. Use heavy or whipping cream — its fat protects the egg from curdling in the acid. Half-and-half or light cream will break far more readily.
- Twenty minutes is a long boilCabbage wedges cooked twenty minutes will be very soft and sulphurous by modern taste. Eight to twelve minutes gives wedges that hold together and still have some bite; test with a knife tip at the core.
- Temper the eggThe original says to add the egg and cream straight to the boiling vinegar. Safer to pull the pan off the heat, whisk a ladleful of the hot vinegar mixture into the egg and cream first, then return everything to low heat.
- VinegarUnspecified, as usual for the period; cider vinegar suits the sweet-sour balance. Four tablespoons against two of sugar is sharp — taste before serving and adjust.
- Drain thoroughlyWet cabbage will thin the sauce to nothing. Let the drained wedges sit in the colander a minute or two, and press gently.
- YieldOne head should give roughly four to six side portions, though the recipe states no yield. Serve immediately; the sauce will not reheat without separating.
Cabbage dressed hot with a sweet-sour egg-and-cream sauce is a pattern common to German and Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, where hot bacon or cream dressings over cabbage and lettuce were standard. Why the dish carries the "Charleston" label is not clear from the recipe itself. A sauce built on egg, cream, oil and vinegar was a way of making an ordinary winter cabbage worth putting on a dinner table, and the recipe's structure, an emulsion-ish dressing poured hot over a boiled vegetable, is closer to a warm slaw than to anything baked.