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Lady Cabbage
Shred cabbage, drop into boiling salt water and boil for five minutes. Drain. In pan place one or two chopped onions, 2 T butter. Add cabbage, sugar, vinegar, salt and pepper to taste. Let simmer about twenty minutes.
Mrs. R. F. Wright.
A sweet-sour braised cabbage with no quantities given for the seasoning, which is typical of church-supper books where the cook was assumed to know the dish. The proportions below are a working starting point.
- QuantitiesOne medium head of cabbage, about 2 lb shredded, suits 2 tablespoons butter and one or two onions. For the sweet-sour balance start with 2 tablespoons cider vinegar and 1 tablespoon sugar, then adjust at the end of the simmer.
- T means tablespoonCapital T is a tablespoon in these books; a lowercase t is a teaspoon. Two tablespoons of butter is 1 oz.
- The five-minute blanchThis is a parboil to soften the cabbage and take off its raw sulphur edge, not a cooking step. Use plenty of salted water at a full boil so the pot recovers quickly, and drain well — wet cabbage will steam rather than take up the butter.
- Sweat the onion firstThe recipe reads as though the onion and butter go in cold. Give the onion five or six minutes in the butter over medium heat before the cabbage joins it, or it will stay sharp against the vinegar.
- Twenty minutes coveredWith drained cabbage and no added liquid beyond the vinegar there is little moisture in the pan. Keep it covered on low heat, stirring now and then; add a splash of water if it begins to catch.
- Season the vinegar lastThe recipe adds sugar, vinegar, salt and pepper 'to taste' before the simmer. In practice it is easier to judge the balance after the simmer, off the heat, and correct the sugar and vinegar then.
- YieldServes six as a side dish. Reheats well and is arguably better the next day.
Church and lodge cookbooks of the early twentieth century are full of sweet-sour cabbage under genteel names — Lady Cabbage, Dutch cabbage — though nothing records what the names were meant to convey. The dish resembles the German and Central European braised cabbages cooked widely in the American Midwest, here with butter rather than bacon fat, no caraway, no juniper, and the sugar and vinegar left to the cook's own hand. Attribution by married name — Mrs. R. F. Wright — was the standard form in books of this kind.