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Red Cabbage with Chestnuts
1 red cabbage 1 tablespoon drippings 1/2 cup melted grape jelly 1/2 cup water Salt and pepper French chestnuts Select a nice red cabbage, remove the outer leaves and soak for a short time in cold water. Drain, and slice in thin shreds. Melt the fat in a saucepan, add the jelly and the cabbage, the water, salt and pepper. Cook very slowly until tender. At the same time, boil some French chestnuts; take off the skin and add them to the cabbage. Cook all slowly for about two hours, until the liquid has evaporated.
A braised red cabbage in the French manner, sweetened with jelly rather than sugar and finished with whole chestnuts. The instructions are loose on quantities in a few places; the notes below fill the gaps.
- The hinge: low and coveredCabbage cooked hard in a small amount of liquid will scorch and turn grey-brown before it is tender. Keep the pan barely at a simmer with the lid on for most of the two hours, then uncover at the end to drive off the remaining liquid.
- Amount of cabbageOne average red cabbage is roughly 2 lb trimmed, which is about 8 packed cups of shreds. That fills a 4-quart pan and cooks down to about six side servings.
- Chestnuts"French chestnuts" are simply the large sweet European chestnut, Castanea sativa. Figure 1/2 to 3/4 lb in the shell, or about 8 oz of vacuum-packed peeled chestnuts, which need no boiling and can be added in the last 30 minutes.
- Peeling themScore an X in the flat side, boil 8-10 minutes, and lift out a few at a time. Both the shell and the inner brown pellicle come away most easily while the nut is hot; once cooled they are much harder to peel.
- DrippingsThe recipe does not say which; beef or bacon drippings are the likeliest. A tablespoon of either, or of butter or a neutral oil, does the same work here; the fat is for flavour, not for frying.
- Grape jellyHalf a cup of melted jelly is the whole sweet-and-sour element, and half a cup is a lot of sweetness. Start with a scant 1/3 cup and add more near the end; a splash of red wine vinegar or lemon juice keeps the colour bright and stops it reading as dessert.
- ColourRed cabbage holds its colour only in acid. If the finished pan looks purple-blue, a teaspoon of vinegar stirred in will bring the red back.
- LiquidHalf a cup of water plus the jelly is little for two hours of cooking. Check every 20 minutes and add water by the tablespoon if the pan runs dry before the cabbage is tender.
Braised red cabbage with chestnuts belongs to the cold-weather cooking of northern and eastern France, where it is served with pork, goose, game and boudin, and it has close cousins across the German and Flemish border regions. The sweet-sour balance is traditional; what marks this as American is the use of a jar of grape jelly to supply the sweetness, where a French kitchen would more likely reach for apple, redcurrant jelly, or sugar with vinegar. Grape jelly was a cheap and widely available pantry staple in the United States by the 1920s. The chestnuts are the older element: before they became a luxury import, chestnuts were a bulk starch across much of southern Europe, and pairing them with cabbage made a substantial dish out of two inexpensive winter keepers.