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Scalloped Cabbage and Corn
1 C milk 2 T shortening Salt Pepper Chop cabbage finely. Season it and corn to taste. Butter and season cracker crumbs. Cut pimento into strips. Beat egg and add milk to it. Into a greased casserole put half the cabbage. Over this spread half the corn and sprinkle half the crumbs over the corn. Lay over the crumbs half the pimento strips. Repeat, pouring the milk mixture over the last layer of corn before putting on the second layer of crumbs. Garnish top with last of pimento. Bake for 20 minutes in oven at 350 degrees, or until nicely browned.
Mrs. F. H. Steele, Kewanee, Ill.
A church-supper casserole from a book that assumes its readers already know what a scalloped dish looks like. The printed ingredient list is incomplete, so most of the quantities have to be reasoned out from the method.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the milk, shortening, salt and pepper are listed; cabbage, corn, egg, pimento and cracker crumbs appear in the method with no amounts at all. For a standard 1 1/2-quart dish, roughly half a small head of cabbage, a can of corn, one egg and a cup of crumbs will fill the layers the recipe describes, but these are inferences, not the book's numbers.
- CornIn community cookbooks of this kind the corn is most likely canned, drained, or the cut kernels of cooked fresh ears. Frozen kernels work but should be thawed and patted dry so they do not water down the custard.
- ShorteningThe recipe never says where the 2 T go; the likeliest use is the fat for the crumbs "buttered" in the method, though it may equally be for greasing the casserole. Butter is the better choice: period shortening meant lard or a hydrogenated vegetable fat, and the flavour of either is not what this dish wants.
- PimentoSold then in small tins as whole roasted red peppers, mild and soft. A jar of pimentos or a drained roasted red pepper cut into strips is the same thing.
- Chop the cabbage genuinely fineTwenty minutes at 350F is not long enough to soften coarse shreds. Cut it small, close to a slaw shred, or blanch it briefly first, or the layers will still be crunchy when the top browns.
- The custardOne beaten egg with a cup of milk is a thin custard, and it is poured only over the second layer of corn. It should set rather than boil; if the top browns before the centre firms, tent it with foil for a few minutes.
- Timing and browningTwenty minutes at 350F browns buttered crumbs but leaves a cold-assembled dish barely warm through. Expect 35 to 45 minutes if the vegetables go in raw, and judge by a set centre rather than the clock.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Built in a 1 1/2-quart dish it would serve about four as a main or six to eight as a side.
Scalloped vegetables — layered with crumbs, bound with milk or a thin custard, baked until the top browns — were the workhorse of American church and grange suppers from the late nineteenth century well into the mid twentieth, because they could be assembled ahead, carried, and stretched to feed whoever turned up. The pimento strips are the period's signature touch: canned Spanish-type sweet peppers became widely available in the United States in the early 1900s and turn up throughout community cookbooks of the 1920s and 1930s as the cheap way to put colour on a pale dish, the same instinct that put them in cream cheese spreads and macaroni salads. That the contributor is credited by her husband's initials and her town, Kewanee, is typical of these compilations.