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Creamed Cabbage
1 pint boiled and minced cabbage 1/2 pint hot milk 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon pepper Put the cabbage, hot milk, salt and pepper in a saucepan on the fire. Beat the butter and flour together until creamy, and then stir into the contents of the saucepan. Simmer ten minutes until the raw taste of the flour is gone, being careful not to scorch the sauce. Serve very hot.
A plain white-sauce vegetable dish that depends entirely on two things: cabbage that was boiled properly in the first place, and a sauce that is stirred rather than left to sit on the heat.
- The measuresA pint here is a volume of prepared cabbage, roughly 2 cups minced after boiling. The half pint of hot milk is 1 cup.
- Beurre manié, not a rouxButter and flour beaten together raw and stirred into hot liquid is the classic beurre manié. Add it in small pinches while stirring so it disperses; dropped in as one lump it will make a skin around itself and leave lumps behind.
- A very light sauceOne teaspoon of flour to a cup of milk gives barely more than a nap of thickening. If you want the sauce to coat the cabbage rather than pool under it, use a tablespoon of flour with a tablespoon of butter.
- The pepperHalf a teaspoon of pepper against half a teaspoon of salt is unusually heavy by modern seasoning. Start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust at the end.
- Boiling the cabbage firstThe recipe assumes cabbage already cooked, and it gives no time for that step; period boiling times for cabbage were generally longer than modern ones. Eight to ten minutes in well-salted water is enough; drain it hard and press out the water, or it will thin the sauce on the plate.
- ScorchingMilk with a little flour in it catches on the bottom of a thin pan quickly, and scorched milk taints the whole dish. Use a heavy saucepan over low heat and stir across the base every minute of the ten.
- YieldServes three or four as a side dish, two if it is the vegetable centre of a meal.
Creamed vegetables were a workhorse of meatless cookery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where a cream sauce supplied the fat and richness a joint would otherwise have carried. Such books were written for Lenten tables, for vegetarian households influenced by temperance and health-reform movements, and for cooks working through weeks when meat was dear. Cabbage, cheap and available through the winter from the root cellar, was among the vegetables most often creamed. The beurre manie technique used here, softened butter kneaded with flour and stirred into hot liquid, remains the quickest way to thicken a sauce already in the pan.