Home › Vegetables › Red Cabbage with Sour Apples
Red Cabbage with Sour Apples
1 head cabbage 2 sour apples Scald cabbage and pour off the water. Add more water and the apples and cook until tender. Then pour on following dressing: 1 T butter 1. T flour 1 onion. 1/2 C vinegar Salt and pepper Sugar to taste Cook the butter, flour and onion, then add vinegar and seasonings.
A compact German-American braised red cabbage, written for cooks who already knew the dish. The proportions are loose and the dressing is a simple vinegar roux.
- The hinge: shred, don't quarter"1 head cabbage" means finely shredded — a medium head, about 2 lb, gives roughly 8 cups. Left in wedges it will not cook evenly.
- Scalding and the colorPouring off the first water removes some of the sulfurous edge, but it also leaches pigment and leaves the cabbage at the mercy of the cooking water; red cabbage holds its colour in acid and shifts toward a dull blue-grey without it. The vinegar in the dressing restores it.
- Sour applesPeriod cooks meant a firm, tart cooking apple — Greening, Baldwin, Winesap. Granny Smith is the reliable substitute. Peel, core and slice or coarsely chop; whole apples will not break down properly alongside the cabbage.
- "Cook until tender"Expect 30 to 45 minutes covered over low heat with about a cup of water, stirring now and then. Braised red cabbage is forgiving and improves with longer cooking; crisp-tender is not the goal here.
- T and CT is a tablespoon, C a cup — so 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour, 1/2 cup vinegar. Cider vinegar suits this better than white distilled. The onion is presumably chopped fine, since it is cooked with the butter and flour.
- The dressingCook butter, flour and onion together until the onion softens and the flour loses its raw smell, two or three minutes, then whisk in the vinegar. Undiluted 1/2 cup vinegar is aggressive; taste before adding all of it, and use the sugar to balance — a tablespoon or two is typical.
- Combine and finishStir the dressing into the cabbage and let it simmer a further five minutes so the flour thickens the pan liquid and the flavors settle.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish. It reheats well and is arguably better the next day.
Sweet-sour red cabbage with apples is a fixture of German and Central European cooking — Rotkohl or Blaukraut, the two names largely a matter of regional usage, though they are often said to reflect the color chemistry that vinegar controls. Its appearance in a Presbyterian church cookbook from Libertyville, Illinois, is a fair map of northern Illinois settlement: German and Scandinavian families were numerous in Lake County by the turn of the century, and their dishes entered the community fundraising cookbook. The terseness is characteristic of the genre. Contributors wrote down what would jog a neighbor's memory, not what would teach a stranger, which is why the recipe never says to shred the cabbage or how long anything takes. The vinegar-and-flour dressing cooked separately and poured over, rather than braised with everything in one pot, survives in this book as evidence of how such recipes were assembled from remembered parts.