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Boiled New Cabbage
Cut cabbage into quarters, removing hard part of core, and place in cold water 30 minutes. Drain, cover with boiling water and boil, without a cover, 30 minutes, or until tender. Drain, put into dish and pour over Cream Sauce or Bechamel Sauce.
A plain boiled vegetable from the era when cabbage was cooked until it surrendered. The method is sound in its bones; only the timing needs rethinking.
- Cut the timeThirty minutes turns new cabbage grey, sulphurous and slack. Quarters of a young head are tender in 8 to 12 minutes; test the thickest part of the stem with a knife tip and pull it the moment it gives.
- Why no coverThe uncovered pot is the one instruction to keep. Sulphur compounds released as cabbage cooks escape as steam rather than condensing back into the water, which keeps both the smell and the flavour milder.
- The cold soakThe recipe does not say why the 30-minute soak is wanted; the usual explanation for soaking field-cut cabbage is grit and insects, though the recipe calls for plain cold water rather than salted. With supermarket heads it is unnecessary, though a brief soak does crisp a limp one.
- "New cabbage"This means the early, loose-leaved spring and summer heads, not the dense winter storage cabbage. A tight late-season head wants a few minutes longer and benefits from being shredded rather than quartered.
- Salt the waterThe recipe omits it. Salt the boiling water as you would for pasta; cabbage boiled in plain water needs a great deal of correcting at the table.
- Drain thoroughlyStand the quarters cut side down in a colander for a minute or two. Water trapped between the leaves will thin the sauce on the serving dish.
- The sauceCream sauce is a milk-based white sauce; in cookbooks of this period bechamel is commonly the richer version, made with white stock as well as milk or cream, though this page does not say which formula is meant. Either wants a firm hand with pepper and a scrape of nutmeg.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; one medium head, quartered, will serve about four as a side dish.
Boiled cabbage with a white sauce is the respectable face of a vegetable that English and American cookery long treated as peasant food, and the sauce is precisely what made it fit for a dinner table. A Vegetables chapter in a book of this kind served largely to show that plain produce could be dressed up, and a cream or bechamel sauce was the standard means of doing it. The very long boiling times such books specify reflect both older, tougher field varieties and a period anxiety about raw or underdone vegetables; the shift toward brief cooking and bright colour belongs to the middle of the century and after.