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Cabbage Au Gratin
Boil the cabbage, put it in a colander and press out all the water; then put it in a chopping bowl and mince. Put a layer of the chopped cabbage in a baking-dish and cover with a layer of cheese, and a layer of white sauce made of 1 cup of milk, 1 tablespoon of flour, 2 tablespoons of butter, seasoned with salt and paprika. Fill the baking dish with layers in this order, making the top layer of bread crumbs dotted with bits of butter. Bake in the oven until the bread crumbs are nicely browned.
The sauce bubbling through the crumbs is an indication that it has been sufficiently cooked.
A straightforward gratin whose only real weakness is the cabbage's water content. Everything else is a matter of filling in the numbers the original leaves out.
- Dry the cabbage hardThis is the hinge. Boiled cabbage holds a surprising amount of water, and pressing it in a colander is not enough — wring the minced cabbage in a clean towel. Wet cabbage will thin the sauce into a puddle under the crumbs.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 375F; the dish is already cooked through, so you are only setting the sauce and colouring the crumbs, which takes roughly 25 to 30 minutes.
- The white sauce is shortOne cup of milk with 1 tablespoon flour and 2 tablespoons butter is a thin sauce with more fat than thickener. For a gratin that holds together, equal measures of butter and flour — 2 tablespoons each to a cup of milk — gives a better body. You may need a second batch for a full-sized baking dish.
- CheeseUnspecified, as was common in American recipes of this period, when "cheese" in an American kitchen usually meant a firm yellow Cheddar-type. Any good melting cheese works; about 6 ounces grated for a 2-quart dish.
- Boiling timeCut the cabbage in wedges and boil 8 to 10 minutes, no more. Period instructions for cabbage could run much longer, sometimes half an hour, and prolonged cooking builds the sulphur compounds that give boiled cabbage its smell.
- PaprikaIn this period paprika in American kitchens was usually the sweet Hungarian kind, used as much for colour on a pale sauce as for heat. Smoked paprika will taste anachronistic here.
- Quantity and yieldOne medium head, about 2 pounds, fills a 2-quart dish and serves four to six as a side, or about four as a light main course.
- Judging donenessThe original's test is sound — sauce bubbling up through the crumbs means the interior is hot. If the crumbs brown before that happens, the oven is too high.
Meatless cookbooks proliferated in the United States around the First World War, when Herbert Hoover's Food Administration pushed "meatless Tuesdays" and wheatless days to free up supplies for shipment to Europe. Cheese and milk dishes did the heavy lifting in these books, and the gratin was ideal: it turned a cheap, storable vegetable into something rich enough to sit at the centre of a plate. The technique itself is French — au gratin refers to the browned crust, from gratter, to scrape, the crust originally being what you scraped from the dish. American cooks of the period took the crumb-and-butter topping as the defining feature and applied it to a great many boiled vegetables in the garden. Cabbage was a natural candidate: abundant, keeps for months in a cold cellar, and improves considerably from the addition of fat and salt.