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Stuffed Cabbage
Take I good solid head of cabbage and remove part of the center very carefully. Pack the cavity with sausage meat, sprinkle salt over it, and cover with a large cabbage leaf securely tied in place. Place in a kettle of boiling water, and when it is boiling sufficiently fast remove the cover and boil for one hour.
A whole cabbage hollowed out, filled with bulk sausage, and boiled — an economical one-pot dish that needs almost nothing from a modern cook except attention to the fit of the filling and the internal temperature of the meat.
- The hinge: a tight packAny air pocket between sausage and cabbage fills with water and the filling falls apart when you cut it. Press the meat in firmly, in stages, so the cavity is solid before the leaf goes on.
- Hollowing the headTake out the core and enough of the dense inner leaves to leave a cavity roughly the size of a large orange, working from the stem end with a paring knife and a spoon. Leave at least an inch of leaf wall all round or the head collapses in the water.
- "Sausage meat"This means plain bulk pork sausage, not links and not cured sausage. About 1 lb fills an average head; today's bulk sausage is already seasoned, so the extra salt sprinkle is optional.
- Tying the leafBlanch the covering leaf for a minute so it turns pliable, then tie the whole head in a criss-cross with kitchen twine. Cheesecloth wrapped round the head works better still and keeps stray leaves from drifting off in the pot.
- "Remove the cover"This almost certainly means the lid of the kettle rather than the cabbage leaf, which is tied on and stays put. Keep the water at a steady, not violent, boil for the hour.
- Check the meat, not the clockAn hour is generally enough for a pound of sausage in a cabbage, but the filling is insulated by the surrounding leaf. Take it to 160F at the center of the meat with an instant-read thermometer before serving.
- Yield and servingOne head serves four. Drain it well, let it sit five minutes so the filling firms, then cut into wedges through the stem end so each portion carries both meat and leaf. The cooking water, skimmed, makes a decent broth base.
Stuffed cabbage in one form or another runs through most of northern and eastern Europe — leaves rolled around meat and grain in Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Sweden and the Levant — and the whole-head version here saves the cook the work of separating and filling twenty leaves. The arithmetic is straightforward: a pound of cheap ground pork feeds four once a cabbage is doing most of the bulk, and it cooks in a single kettle of water on one burner. Cabbage earned that role honestly, being cheap, storing for months in a cellar, and yielding a great deal of food per square foot of garden, which is why it appears so often in the economy sections of American household manuals from the nineteenth century onward.