Home › Meat Substitutes › Boiled Cabbage
Boiled Cabbage
Cut a small head of cabbage into four parts, cutting down through the stock. Soak for half an hour in a pan of cold water to which has been added a tablespoon of salt; this is to draw out any insects that may be hidden in the leaves. Take from the water, and cut into slices. Have a large saucepan half full of boiling water, and put in the cabbage, pushing it under the water with a spoon. Add one tablespoon of salt and one-quarter teaspoon of baking soda. Cook from twenty-five to forty-five minutes, depending upon the age of the cabbage. Turn into a colander, and drain for about two minutes. Put in a chopping bowl, and mince. Season with butter and pepper, and more salt if needed. Allow a tablespoon of butter to a pint of cooked cabbage. Have the kitchen windows open at the top while the cabbage is boiling, and there will be little if any odor of cabbage in the house. Over-cooking turns cabbage yellow, gives it a strong flavor, and is the cause of digestive disturbance.
A plain boiled cabbage from the era when vegetables were cooked far longer than we cook them now. The recipe's own closing sentence is the most useful line in it.
- Cut the time hardTwenty-five to forty-five minutes is well past the point where cabbage turns sulphurous and grey-yellow. Sliced cabbage in boiling salted water is done in six to ten minutes, a wedge in twelve to fifteen; the recipe's warning about overcooking contradicts its own timing.
- Skip the baking sodaThe quarter teaspoon was added to hold the green colour, and it does briefly, but alkaline water breaks down cell walls and destroys much of the vitamin C. It leaves the cabbage slippery and faintly soapy. Salt alone is enough.
- The salt soakHalf an hour in cold salted water was standard insurance against cabbage worms in field-grown, unwashed heads. Supermarket cabbage rarely needs it; a quartered head from a garden or market stall still benefits.
- Cutting through the stock"Stock" here means the stalk or core. Quartering through it holds the leaves together during the soak; cut the dense core out before slicing, since it cooks slower than the leaves.
- Mincing in a chopping bowlA wooden bowl and curved chopper was the standard tool for reducing cooked vegetables to a coarse mince. A few strokes with a knife on a board does the same. Drain well first or the result is watery.
- Butter ratioA tablespoon of butter to a pint of cooked cabbage is about 15 g to 500 ml, which is restrained by modern habit. Double it if the cabbage is going alongside something plain.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. A small head will probably cook down to something near a quart, enough for about four as a side dish.
- The odourOpen windows help, but the real cause is the long boil. Cabbage releases hydrogen sulphide and related compounds progressively; a short cook in a large volume of water produces very little smell.
Meatless Cookery belongs to the wave of American cookbooks published around the First World War, when wheatless and meatless days were a matter of public campaign as much as household economy, and cabbage was among the cheapest and longest-keeping vegetables a family could buy. If the recipe sits under "Meat Substitutes," that says less about cabbage's protein content than about how such books were organised: the section gathered anything that could carry a meal in the absence of a joint. The baking soda trick was widely printed in nineteenth-century manuals and was being argued against by some domestic-science writers of this period, who held that alkali cost the vegetable its food value -- though vitamins had not yet been identified, so the objection was not framed as we would frame it. The long boiling times reflect older, tougher, field-stored cabbage rather than the tender heads sold now, and the note that overcooking "is the cause of digestive disturbance" is a plain observation dressed in the confident physiological language the era favoured.