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Cabbage with Pork
For a small head of cabbage use half a pound of minced salt pork. Boil the pork gently for three or four hours. Prepare the cabbage as for plain boiled cabbage; drain well and put on to boil with the pork. Boil and serve the pork with the cabbage. A little additional salt may be needed.
Smoked bacon or ham or corned beef may be substituted for the pork; but these are usually better if cooked separately from the cabbage.
A plain New England boiled dinner in miniature. The recipe assumes you know how to boil cabbage, so the only real decisions are the pork and the timing.
- "Minced salt pork"minced here means cut up rather than ground; in practice a half pound cut into small dice works for a boil this long. Modern salt pork is often fattier and saltier than older cures, so rinse it and taste the liquor before deciding whether the recipe's "additional salt" is wanted at all.
- The three-hour boilThat long, gentle simmer is for the pork, not the cabbage — it renders the fat and seasons the water into a cooking broth. Keep it at a bare tremble; a hard boil toughens the lean streaks and clouds the pot.
- Cabbage timing"Prepare as for plain boiled cabbage" in this period often meant twenty minutes or more, which reduces it to grey pulp. A small head cut into wedges needs 8–12 minutes in the pork liquor, until a knife meets slight resistance at the core.
- Cabbage sizeA small head is about 1½ lb. That plus a half pound of pork feeds two generously or four as a side.
- "Drain well" firstThe recipe sends you to its own method for plain boiled cabbage, so what is being drained is not spelled out here; most likely it is the cabbage after trimming and soaking in cold water rather than a separate parboil. If you do parboil and discard that water, use a lighter hand with the pork liquor afterwards.
- The substitutionsMrs. Fryer is right that smoked bacon, ham or corned beef are better cooked apart. Smoke and the spices in corned-beef cure leach heavily into the water and will dominate the cabbage; cook them separately and moisten the cabbage with a ladle of their broth instead.
- ServingLift the pork out, slice it, and lay it over the drained cabbage with a little of the pot liquor spooned on. Mustard or cider vinegar on the table is welcome against the fat.
Salt pork and cabbage is one of the oldest working combinations in the Anglo-American kitchen: pork was the meat most households could keep through the year in brine, and cabbage the vegetable that kept longest in a cellar. Cooking them in one pot stretched a small amount of cured meat across a family meal and leaned on the salt in the pork for seasoning — the same thinking behind the New England boiled dinner and Irish bacon and cabbage. Loose-leaf cookbooks of this era were sold in binders so a cook could add pages, and their vegetable sections often assume a master method ("as for plain boiled cabbage") stated once elsewhere and cross-referenced after. The note that smoked meats are better cooked separately is a piece of kitchen judgment rather than tradition, and it still holds.