Pan Kail
INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 persons.-2 lbs. of cabbage or Savoy greens; 1/4 1/4 lb. of dripping, salt and pepper to taste, oatmeal for thickening, 2 quarts of water.
AVERAGE COST, 4d.
PARADISE PUDDING. 287 PARSLEY, TO PRESERVE. dry it before the fire, and when thoroughly crisp it will be ready for use.
Chop the cabbage very fine, thicken the water with oatmeal, put in the cabbage and dripping; season and simmer for 1½ hour. It can be made sooner by blanching and mashing the greens, adding any any good basket, as shown in the annexed engravliquor that a joint has been boiled in, and ing, will be found very useful. It is very then further thickened with bread or pounded biscuit.
TIME.-1½ hour.
SEASONABLE all the year, but more suitable in winter.
A Scots cabbage broth thickened with oatmeal — cheap, filling, and built around dripping rather than butter or stock. It works, but a few of the quantities and habits need translating.
- Oatmeal as thickenerUse medium or pinhead oatmeal, not rolled oats, and scatter it into the water while whisking so it does not clump. Roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons per 2 quarts gives a broth with body; more turns it into porridge.
- DrippingA quarter pound is 4 oz, about half a cup of beef or bacon fat. That is generous by modern taste and is the only real flavouring in the pot besides the greens; 2 oz is ample if you are also using meat stock.
- Cooking timeThe instructions give both an hour and an hour and a half. Ninety minutes is right if you want the traditional soft, almost dissolved cabbage; an hour is enough for the oatmeal to swell and thicken. Green cabbage will not keep any colour either way.
- Which cabbageThe recipe allows either plain cabbage or Savoy greens; Savoy is the crinkled, dark sort, sweet after frost. Two pounds is roughly one large head, trimmed weight, shredded as finely as you can manage so it breaks down into the broth.
- The quicker versionBlanching and mashing the greens, then using the water a joint was boiled in, is the better soup: the meat liquor supplies salt and gelatine that plain water cannot. Taste before seasoning, since boiling liquor from a salted joint is often salty enough already.
- Bread or biscuit thickening"pounded biscuit" here most likely means a plain hard dried biscuit crushed to crumbs, used as an alternative thickener. Stale breadcrumbs do the same job and want only five minutes' simmering.
- YieldAs written it is given as soup for eight. Oatmeal thickens considerably on standing, so keep extra stock or water back to loosen it when reheating.
Kail (or kale) in Scots long meant broth in general as much as the vegetable itself, and a pan kail is often said to be simply the kail made in the pan — the everyday cabbage-and-oatmeal broth of Lowland kitchens, distinct from kail brose, which is oatmeal steeped in kail or beef liquor, or from Scotch broth with its barley and mutton. Oatmeal did the thickening work that flour or rice did further south, and dripping stood in for butter, which cost money. The note that it is "more suitable in winter" is the point of the dish: Savoy and other hardy greens stood in the ground through frost when little else did, and the liquor from a boiled joint was too valuable to throw away. Its inclusion in a Victorian household manual at fourpence for eight servings marks it out as an economy recipe, printed for readers who needed to feed a family rather than set a table.