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Creamed Cabbage
Make a cream sauce; add the boiled cabbage, chopped; bring to a boil and serve, sprinkling a little chopped parsley over the top of the dish.
A one-line recipe of the sort that assumes you already know the book's basic cream sauce. The whole dish hinges on getting water out of the cabbage before it meets the sauce.
- The cream sauceA common proportion in books of this era is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it thickens; thinner versions using 1 tablespoon each are equally common. A cup of sauce suits roughly a pound of cooked cabbage; season with salt, white pepper and, if you like, a scrape of nutmeg, since the recipe as printed gives no seasoning at all.
- Drain hardBoiled cabbage holds a surprising amount of water, and it will thin the sauce to milk if you let it. Drain in a colander, press with the back of a spoon, then chop and press again on a towel.
- Boil the cabbage brieflyMany period recipes called for twenty or thirty minutes in a large volume of water. Eight to ten minutes for shredded cabbage, or twelve to fifteen for wedges, gives tender leaves without the sulfurous smell that made boiled cabbage notorious.
- "Bring to a boil" means barelyOnce the cabbage is in, heat only until it steams through. A hard boil in a flour-thickened sauce scorches the bottom of the pan and dulls the cabbage further.
- Cabbage choiceGreen or white head cabbage is what is meant. Savoy works and holds its texture; red cabbage will bleed into the sauce and turn it grey-violet.
- Yield and servingA small head, about 1 1/2 lb raw, serves four as a side. It does not hold well, so sauce it at the last minute and get it to the table.
Creamed vegetables were the workhorse of the American cookbook between roughly 1880 and 1930: one master white sauce, learned once, then applied to onions, celery, peas, potatoes, salsify and cabbage in turn. That is likely why this entry is three clauses long — the sauce may well be elsewhere in the book, leaving the vegetable section only to say what to add it to. The technique itself is generally traced to French practice, a plain but honest work: it made cheap winter storage vegetables palatable and rich at a time when cabbage was one of the few fresh things in the cellar from November onward. The parsley on top is the standard finishing gesture of the period, doing for a pale dish what a sprig of garnish did for everything on a hotel plate.