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Stewed Cabbage
Cut a small head of cabbage into quarters and soak in cold water one hour, drain and shake; remove the hard part and chop the remainder rather fine. Put in a stewing pan with sufficient boiling water to cover it, add a teaspoonful of salt, boil twenty minutes. Drain in a colander, turn into a heated dish and pour over it, Cream Sauce.
A plain boiled cabbage finished with a white sauce, from a period when vegetables were cooked far longer than we cook them now. The method works, but the timing is the thing to reconsider.
- The twenty-minute boilFinely chopped cabbage in boiling water is tender in five to eight minutes. Twenty minutes turns it grey and develops the sulphurous smell that gives boiled cabbage its reputation. Test at five minutes and drain the moment it yields.
- The cold soakThe hour in cold water would have served to crisp the leaves and, probably, to float out insects from garden or market cabbage. With supermarket heads it does little; a quick rinse after chopping is enough, though a soak does no harm if the cabbage is limp.
- "Remove the hard part"The core and the thickest white ribs. Cut them out in a wedge from each quarter; they cook much slower than the leaf and are the usual reason a pan of cabbage finishes unevenly.
- Cream SauceA basic white sauce: roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk or thin cream, cooked out and seasoned with salt and pepper. Make it while the cabbage soaks and keep it warm over hot water.
- Drain hardCabbage holds a great deal of water and will thin the sauce to nothing in the serving dish. Press it in the colander, or return it briefly to the dry hot pan to steam off before saucing.
- AmountsTake a "small head" as roughly 1 to 1.5 lb trimmed, which serves four as a side dish. The teaspoon of salt is for the cooking water, not the finished dish.
Cabbage under a white sauce is one of the most persistent dishes in nineteenth-century English and American cookery, and it appears in a book like this precisely because cabbage was cheap and stored through winter. The cream sauce here is doing double duty, adding fat and richness to a vegetable that has none, and softening a flavour that long boiling had coarsened. Soaking in cold water before cooking belongs to ordinary kitchen habit with garden produce, where a cold bath served to dislodge insects from between the leaves before anything went near the pot.