Sea-Kale, Boiled
INGREDIENTS.
To each 1/2 gallon of water allow 1 heaped tablespoonful of salt. AVERAGE COST, Id, per basket.
Well wash the kale, cut away any wormeaten pieces, and tie it into small bunches; put it into boiling water, salted in the above proportion, and let it boil quickly until tender. Take it out, drain, d untie the bunches, and serve with plain melted SEA-KALE. butter or white sauce, a little of which may be poured over the kale. Sea-kale may also be parboiled and stewed in good brown gravy; it will then take about 1/2 hour altogether.
TIME.-15 minutes; when liked very thoroughly done, allow an extra 5 minutes.
SEASONABLE from February to June.
Sea Pie. INGREDIENTS for pie for 5 or 6 persons.-1 lb. of gravy beef, 3 lbs. of potatoes, an onion, pepper and salt, 1 lb. of suet or dripping crust. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 5d.
Having washed and peeled the potatoes, put them in cold water till wanted. Line SEED BISCUITS. a dish with the crust, then cut up the meat in small pieces and lay in, over it putting the onion sliced, with plenty of seasoning, and a dredge of flour. Fill up with quartered potatoes, and pour in 1/2 pint of water. Tie the dish in a cloth, plunge it into a saucepan of boiling water, and boil gently for 2 hours.
TIME.-2 hours.
SEASONABLE as a winter dish for children.
Two entries run together here: boiled sea-kale with its sauce, and a boiled suet-crust sea pie. Both are straightforward, but the vegetable is now a rarity and both timings reflect a period taste for very well-cooked food.
- What sea-kale isCrambe maritima, a coastal perennial grown for its blanched shoots, pale and forced under pots in winter. It is still sold by specialist growers between January and April but almost never in supermarkets; the stems should be ivory-white and firm. Blanched chicory or young forced rhubarb-thin celery stems are not the same thing, but slender leeks or asparagus cook and sauce in much the same way.
- Boiling timeFifteen minutes, and twenty for those who like it thorough, will reduce forced sea-kale to string. Bundled stems take roughly 5 to 8 minutes in fast-boiling water, or 6 to 8 minutes in a steamer; test with a knife tip at the thick end and stop while there is still slight resistance.
- The salt proportionHalf an imperial gallon is about 2.3 litres, so one heaped tablespoon of salt gives roughly 1 to 1.5 per cent salinity, well short of seawater. That is a reasonable modern proportion for green vegetables and worth keeping.
- "Plain melted butter"In Beeton this is not simply butter melted in a pan but the standard English melted-butter sauce: a light flour-and-butter roux let down with water or stock, seasoned and finished with more butter. A modern hollandaise or a beurre blanc suits the vegetable at least as well.
- "Average cost, 1d. per basket"One penny per basket, a pre-decimal price that is now purely historical. Sea-kale today is a luxury item priced by the small bundle.
- Gravy beefButchers' shorthand for lean stewing beef from the shin or leg, cut for long, slow cooking in liquid. Chuck or shin both work; anything quick-cooking will be dry after two hours.
- Suet or dripping crustA pound of crust, probably meaning pastry made up to that weight, in a common proportion of roughly two parts flour to one part shredded suet, bound with cold water. Packet shredded suet, beef or vegetable, gives much the same result; the crust is meant to be soft and absorbent rather than crisp.
- Boiling the pieThe dish is tied in a cloth and lowered into boiling water, an old steamed-pudding method. A pudding basin covered with pleated baking parchment and foil, tied under the rim and set on a trivet in a covered pan of simmering water, does the job with less drama. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the pan never runs dry over the two hours.
- YieldThe sea-kale serves about one small bundle per person as a side dish. The sea pie is given for five or six, which is generous for a pound of meat because the potatoes do most of the work.
Sea-kale grows wild along shingle beaches in southern England and around the western European coast, where it was gathered long before it was cultivated; the shoots were traditionally blanched by heaping shingle over the crowns, a habit gardeners copied with terracotta forcing pots. It became a fashionable kitchen-garden vegetable in Britain from the late eighteenth century, and its short February-to-June season is exactly why Beeton flags it as seasonable. Sea pie is generally traced to shipboard cooking: a workaday dish of meat and potatoes under a suet crust, boiled in one pot rather than baked, and versions built in layers were, by traditional account, described by the number of "decks". Beeton's note that it is a winter dish for children says a good deal about Victorian household economy, where a pound of shin beef and three pounds of potatoes were expected to feed six for around one shilling and fivepence.