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Scalloped Cabbage
1/2 head of cabbage, 2 level tablespoonfuls of flour, 4 eggs, 2 ounces of butter, 1 pint of milk, 1 teaspoonful of salt, Dash of pepper.
Wash and chop coarsely the cabbage, throw into a kettle of boiling, salted water and boil twenty minutes, drain in a colander. Have ready four hard-boiled eggs chopped fine. Put two tablespoonfuls or two ounces of butter in a saucepan; when melted, add two level tablespoonfuls of flour, add one pint of milk, stir continually until it boils; add the chopped eggs, one teaspoonful of salt and a dash of pepper. Put the cabbage in a baking dish, pour over the sauce, sprinkle with bread crumbs and bake in a quick oven fifteen minutes.
A straightforward white-sauce gratin from the era when cabbage was boiled hard and then rescued with dairy. The only real decisions are how long to boil and how hot to bake.
- Cut the boiling timeTwenty minutes in boiling water turns coarsely chopped cabbage to grey mush and drives off sulphur compounds into the whole kitchen. Six to eight minutes gives tender leaves that still hold their shape in the sauce; drain very well and press lightly, or the sauce will thin out in the dish.
- "A quick oven"A quick oven is usually reckoned at around 400-425F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is enough to brown the crumbs and set the surface, since everything going into the dish is already cooked.
- Butter measured two waysThe recipe equates 2 ounces with 2 tablespoonfuls, but the two are not the same: 2 ounces of butter is about 4 tablespoons (55-57 g). Follow the ounce weight given in the ingredient list.
- The sauce is loose on purposeTwo level tablespoons of flour to a pint of milk is a thin b", chopped egg adds body and the cabbage releases water; if you want it firmer, use three tablespoons of flour.
- Cook the roux brieflyLet the flour and butter bubble together for a minute before the milk goes in, and add the milk gradually while stirring. This is the step the original compresses, and skipping it leaves a raw-flour taste that dairy and cabbage do nothing to hide.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs alone will scorch at a quick oven heat. Toss about half a cup of coarse fresh crumbs with a tablespoon of melted butter first; grated cheese over the top is a reasonable modern liberty.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt for a pint of milk plus already-salted cabbage is on the generous side. Salt the sauce, then taste after the eggs go in. A grating of nutmeg is a common addition to white sauces, though this recipe does not call for it.
- YieldHalf a head of cabbage and a pint of sauce fills a 1.5-quart dish and serves four as a main course, six as a side.
Scalloped dishes were the American home cook's standard method for making a cheap vegetable substantial: boil it, bind it in milk sauce, crumb the top and brown it. The word "scalloped" is generally traced to the practice of serving food in scallop shells, though a link to "collop" has also been proposed, and by the late nineteenth century it had drifted to mean anything baked in a dish under crumbs. The four hard-boiled eggs are what lift this from side dish to supper — before cheese sauces became universal, chopped egg in b hat vegetable into a meatless main course. The long boil seems to reflect a belief of the time that cabbage and other strong vegetables needed extended cooking in a large volume of water to make them digestible, a conviction that appears to have outlasted the evidence for it.