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Dumas' Potage Aux Choux
"Hash up remains of fowl or game, add a slice of ham, cut fine. Remove leaves of cabbage and tie the forcemeat in them and boil in yesterday's bouillon 2 hours."
Dumas, by the way, was one of the great gourmets of France and his 500th book was a cookbook.
A three-sentence recipe that assumes a working nineteenth-century kitchen: cooked leftovers on hand, a ham hanging somewhere, and a pot of yesterday's broth still on the stove. The gaps are all things a cook of the period would have filled in without thinking.
- The hinge: blanch the leaves firstRaw cabbage leaves crack when folded and will not hold a parcel. Drop whole outer leaves into boiling salted water for two or three minutes, cool them, and pare down the thick rib with a knife so each leaf rolls without splitting.
- What "forcemeat" means hereThe hashed fowl or game plus the finely cut ham, chopped fine enough to hold together. Cooked meat has no binding power on its own, so work in a beaten egg and a handful of soaked breadcrumbs, or the parcels will fall open in the pot.
- Tie them properlyKitchen twine, or a second leaf wrapped the other way. Cabbage parcels boiled loose in broth for two hours will unravel and cloud the soup with meat crumbs.
- "Yesterday's bouillon"Ordinary unsalted meat or poultry stock, roughly 2 to 3 quarts for four or five parcels. If it has been sitting in the refrigerator, bring it to a full boil before the cabbage goes in and skim what rises.
- Two hours is too longThe meat is already cooked; only the cabbage needs softening. Forty-five minutes at a bare simmer gives tender leaves and intact parcels. A rolling two-hour boil shreds the cabbage and leaves the filling dry and grainy.
- Salt at the endHam and reduced stock both concentrate as the pot cooks. Taste after the parcels come out rather than seasoning at the start.
- ServingOne parcel per person in a wide bowl with the broth ladled around it. Four large leaves feed four as a first course; count on two each for a supper dish.
Alexandre Dumas père spent his last working years on Le Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine, an alphabetical compendium of food lore, opinion and recipes that he completed shortly before his death in 1870 and that was published posthumously in 1873 — the book behind the claim, repeated here, that his last book was a cookbook. The recipe itself is unremarkable French domestic cooking: potage aux choux is cabbage soup, and this version is a way of turning the last of a roast bird into a second meal by wrapping the scraps in leaves and poaching them in the previous day's broth. That thrift is the point. Stuffed cabbage in some form is found across many European peasant kitchens, and Dumas, for all his reputation as a gourmet, was recording the kind of dish a household cook would produce on a Tuesday rather than anything for a banquet table.