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Butter, to Keep Fresh
Butter may be kept fresh for ten or twelve days by a very simple process. Knead it well in cold water till the buttermilk is extracted; then put it in a glazed jar, which invert in another, putting into the latter a sufficient quantity of water to exclude the air. Renew the water every day. "Can choice and costly dainties taste more sweet Than simple ones by honest labour earned."
CABBAGE, BOILED.
ABBAGE, Boiled.
INGREDIENTS.-To each 1/2 gallon of water allow 1 heaped tablespoonful of salt; a very small piece of soda.
AVERAGE COST, 1d. and 2d. each.
Pick off all the dead outside leaves, cut off as much of the stalk as possible, and cut the cabbages across twice, at the stork end; if they should be very large, quarter them. Wash them well in cold water, place them in a colander, and drain; then put them into plenty of fastboiling water, to which have been added salt and soda in the above proportions.
Stir them down once or twice in the water, keep the pan uncovered, and let them boil quickly until tender. The instant they are done, take them up into a colander, place a plate over them, let them thoroughly drain, dish, cut across and across into small squares, and serve.
CABBAGE, RED. each quart of vinegar, oz. of ginger well bruised, 1 oz. of whole black pepper, and, when liked, a little cayenne. AVERAGE COST, 6d. each.
Take off the outside decayed leaves of a nice red cabbage, cut it in quarters, remove the stalks, and cut it across in very thin slices. Lay these on a dish, and strew them plentifully with salt, covering them with another dish. Let them remain for 24 hours; turn into a colander to drain, and, if necessary, wipe lightly with a clean soft cloth. Put them in a jar; boil up the vinegar with spices in the above proportion, and, when cold, pour it over the cabbage. It will be fit for use in a week or two, but if kept for a very long time, the cabbage is liable to get soft and to discolour. To be really nice and crisp, CABBAGE SEEDLING.
TIME.-Large cabbages, or Savoys, to and of a good red colour, it should be hour, young summer cabbage, 10 to 13 minutes, after the water boils.
SEASONABLE, cabbages and sprouts various kinds, at any time. of
This page has been mangled by the scanner: three separate entries — keeping butter, boiling cabbage and pickling red cabbage — have run together, and some quantities have dropped out entirely. Read it as three short recipes and treat the missing figures with suspicion.
- The butter method, in shortWorking the butter under cold water until no cloudy buttermilk comes away is the whole point; residual buttermilk is what sours first. The inverted-jar arrangement is a water seal, the same principle as the French butter crocks sold today. Use salted, pasteurised butter, keep it out of sunlight and warmth, and change the water daily as instructed.
- Glazed jarsA nineteenth-century "glazed jar" may carry a lead-bearing glaze, and the same applies to the jar used for the pickled cabbage, where acid vinegar will draw metal out of it. Use modern food-safe stoneware or glass.
- The soda in the cabbage waterBicarbonate was added to hold the green colour. It works by breaking down the cell walls, which is why Victorian cabbage was soft, and it accelerates the loss of vitamin C along the way. Leave it out; salt and a large volume of hard-boiling water are enough.
- Cooking timesThe figure for large cabbage or Savoy has dropped out of the scan; whatever it was, these times belong to an era of long boiling (the surviving figure, for young summer cabbage, reads 10 to 13 minutes). Quartered or shredded cabbage is tender in 6 to 10 minutes; a whole halved head takes perhaps 12 to 15. The instruction to keep the pan uncovered is worth following — it lets sulphur compounds escape.
- DrainingThe plate pressed over the colander matters more than it looks. Waterlogged cabbage dilutes butter or sauce and goes cold fast, so drain hard before cutting it across into squares.
- Red cabbage: the missing numbersThe vinegar proportion has been lost from the scan; only the spices per quart survive (bruised ginger of unstated weight, 1 oz whole black pepper, optional cayenne). Judge by volume instead — enough boiled-and-cooled spiced vinegar to submerge the salted cabbage completely.
- The 24-hour saltingThis is a dry salt cure to draw out water, and it is what keeps the pickle crisp. Do not shorten it, and pour the vinegar over only when it is fully cold; hot vinegar softens the slices at once.
- Costs and keeping"1d. and 2d. each" and "6d. each" are pre-decimal pence, of no use except as a reminder of how cheap cabbage was. The pickle is ready in a week or two and is best inside a few months, after which, as the text admits, it goes soft and loses colour.
Boiled cabbage with a pinch of soda is a good marker of mid-Victorian vegetable cookery, where appearance ranked above texture and nutrition was barely understood: the alkali kept the leaves bright green through a boiling long enough to reduce them to pulp. The butter note belongs to the same household world, one without domestic refrigeration, where dairy had to be washed, salted or water-sealed to survive; the practice of storing worked butter under frequently changed water is old and widespread, and survives commercially in the water-sealed butter crock. The pickled red cabbage is the most durable of the three — a salt-then-spiced-vinegar method often said to have altered little in British kitchens since the seventeenth century, and still the standard accompaniment to cold meat. The stray line of verse, "Can choice and costly dainties taste more sweet...", is one of the moralising tags scattered through the alphabetical entries, cheap vegetables being a natural place to preach thrift.