Home › Meat Substitutes › Farmers' Cabbage
Farmers' Cabbage
1 cup cold meat 1 cup cooked cabbage 1 cup cooked tomatoes 1 cup bread crumbs Salt and pepper Chop the meat into small pieces; likewise the cabbage. Put a layer of meat in the bottom of a baking dish; then a layer of cabbage; then a layer of tomatoes. Continue until the entire quantity has been used, seasoning each layer as you go. Cover all with bread crumbs and bake in a moderate oven until brown. A little grated cheese may be added to the top if desired.
A layered leftovers casserole from the era before refrigeration made a stray cup of cooked cabbage worth building a supper around. Everything in it is already cooked, so the bake is only about heating through and browning the top.
- Moderate ovenRead that as 350F. Thirty to forty minutes is enough to heat the layers through and colour the crumbs; there is nothing raw to cook.
- Quantities and yieldThe four cups of layers just about fill a 1-quart dish and will serve two or three, depending on appetite. The proportions scale cleanly if you double them into an 8-inch square pan (roughly 2 quarts).
- Drain the tomatoes"Cooked tomatoes" in a recipe of this period most likely meant stewed or home-canned tomatoes in their own liquor. Drain them well or the crumb topping steams instead of browning and the whole dish slumps.
- Squeeze the cabbageCabbage boiled the day before holds a surprising amount of water. Press it in a sieve or a towel before chopping, for the same reason.
- Cold meatAny cooked meat works; the recipe specifies nothing beyond "cold meat," so leftover roast is the obvious candidate. Chop it rather than shred it so the layers stay distinct.
- Butter the crumbsDry bread crumbs alone tend to scorch in patches. Toss them with a tablespoon of melted butter before scattering, and add the optional cheese in the last ten minutes so it melts without hardening.
- Season firmlyTwice-cooked cabbage and drained tomatoes are both bland. The instruction to season each layer as you go is the one to follow literally.
The dish belongs to a tradition of stretching a cup of yesterday's roast with cabbage, tomatoes and stale bread so that it does the work of a fresh joint. That logic drove a great deal of American home cooking in the early twentieth century, and it intensified during the First World War, when meatless and wheatless days made such stretched dishes a matter of public virtue as well as thrift. The title claims a rural, frugal pedigree; "farmers'" attached to a dish name plausibly signalled plainness and the use of what was already in the house rather than any specific regional tradition.