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Stuffed Cabbage
1 cabbage Butter or butter substitute Parsley Spices 1 cup bread-crums 3 eggs 1 chopped onion Place a thin piece of cheese-cloth in the bottom of a bowl and lay the large cabbage leaves in it. Chop the middle of the cabbage fine and fry it in butter or butter substitute until it is yellow. Remove it from the fire, add a little chopped parsley, spices, bread-crums, eggs and onion. Place this mixture inside the large cabbage leaves, and tie up the cabbage by tying together the four corners of the cloth. Place in a pan of boiling salted water and boil until the cabbage leaves are tender (about thirty-five minutes). When done, remove from the cloth, pour a little melted butter or butter substitute over it, and some fine bread-crums, and bake for five minutes. Serve with a tomato sauce.
A whole-cabbage chou farci reassembled in cheesecloth rather than in a mold. The method works, but the original assumes you know how to make cabbage leaves bend without cracking.
- Blanch the outer leaves firstRaw cabbage leaves split when you fold them around a filling. Drop the eight to ten largest leaves in boiling water for two to three minutes until limp, then cool them in cold water and pat dry before lining the cloth. This is the step the recipe leaves out and the one that decides whether the parcel holds.
- Butter substituteIn 1929 this meant oleomargarine or a vegetable shortening. Butter is fine; a firm stick margarine behaves the same way for browning the crumbs.
- "Spices"Unspecified, as was common. For a French cabbage filling, read it as black pepper with a little nutmeg or allspice, plus salt, which the ingredient list omits entirely. Season the fried cabbage before the eggs go in and taste it then, since you cannot taste it afterward.
- Bread-crumbsThe recipe does not say whether these are dry or fresh. A cup of dry crumbs with three eggs gives a filling that sets firmly; fresh crumbs will absorb less and the mixture will be looser.
- Cook the onionThe onion is added raw, after the pan comes off the heat. Thirty-five minutes of boiling inside a dense parcel will not fully soften it. Fry it with the chopped cabbage instead.
- The cheesecloth parcelLine a bowl with a double layer of cheesecloth large enough to overhang generously, arrange the blanched leaves overlapping with stem ends toward the center, fill, fold the leaves over, then gather and tie the cloth corners tightly. Tight matters: a loose bundle relaxes into a shapeless mass in the water.
- Boiling and the final bakeThirty-five minutes at a steady boil is right for a bundle of this size; test that a skewer meets no resistance. The five-minute bake is only to brown the crumbs, so use a hot oven, 425F, and watch it.
- YieldOne medium cabbage of about two pounds serves four as a main course or six as a side. Cut it in wedges at the table like a cake.
Chou farci belongs to the thrifty end of French provincial cooking, where a single cabbage and a few eggs stretch to feed a table and the stuffing is often whatever meat is left over. This version is meatless, which is why it reads as odd today: the filling is simply the cabbage's own heart, fried and bound with crumbs and egg. Boiling a bundle tied in a cloth was a long-established technique for dishes that had to hold their shape in water, puddings above all. The New Delineator Recipes came out of the Butterick magazine The Delineator; why it carried French dishes of this kind is not recorded, though dishes built on cabbage, crumbs and butter substitute would have suited American household budgets of the late 1920s.