Cabbage Soup
1 cabbage shredded 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 1 pint milk 1 1/2 tablespoons semolina 1 1/2 ounces butter 2 small onions 1 1/2 pints boiling water 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Remove the outer leaves from the cabbage; cut it in half, and soak in cold water one hour, then cut out the stalk, shred the cabbage finely, and put into the saucepan with the boiling water, the milk, the onion, the parsley chopped very fine, the butter, pepper and salt.
Let these come to the boiling point, and cook for one hour; sprinkle in the semolina, stirring constantly, and then boil ten minutes longer. Serve very hot with toasted bread, cut in squares. This soup is improved by straining, then put in a saucepan and reheat.
A plain milk-and-cabbage potage thickened with semolina, typical of meatless cookery before vegetable stock cubes existed. The only real hazard is the milk, which will catch and scorch over an hour of cooking.
- Watch the milkAn hour of boiling milk with cabbage in it will scorch on the bottom and may curdle. Keep the heat at a bare simmer, use a heavy pan, and stir up from the base every few minutes.
- TimingShredded cabbage is tender in 15 to 20 minutes; a full hour reduces it to grey threads and drives off any sweetness. If you intend to strain and serve it smooth, the long cook does no harm, but for a chunky soup stop early.
- SemolinaRain it in through your fingers while stirring or it clumps; 1 1/2 tablespoons in 2 1/2 pints of liquid gives only a light body.
- QuantitiesIf the pints here are imperial 20 fl oz, then 1 pint milk is about 2 1/2 US cups and 1 1/2 pints water about 3 3/4 cups. 1 1/2 ounces butter is 3 tablespoons.
- The cabbage"1 cabbage" presumably means a firm head of a couple of pounds. The long cold soak was probably to draw insects out of garden cabbage; with supermarket cabbage a rinse is enough.
- StrainingThe note at the end is worth following. Pushed through a sieve or briefly blitzed, the soup becomes a pale green velvet; unstrained it is watery liquid with shreds sitting in it.
- SeasoningCabbage and milk together are flat. Taste after straining and expect to add salt, and a grating of nutmeg or a bay leaf in the pot repays itself.
- YieldAround 1 1/2 quarts, serving four to six as a first course with the toasted bread squares.
Cabbage boiled in milk and thickened with a grain belongs to a long northern European tradition of white soups, and it appears in meatless cookery because it delivers fat without stock or bacon — the two things that flavour cabbage in most other kitchens. Books of this kind were often written for two audiences at once: households observing Lent and Fridays, and the vegetarian societies that grew up in Britain and the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century. Semolina as a thickener points to the same economy; it was cheap, kept indefinitely in a dry larder, and did the work that a roux or a cream liaison would do in a richer household. The instruction to serve with toasted bread cut in squares is the old sop, generally traced to a time when soup was poured over bread rather than served beside it.