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Cabbage with Sausages
Cut a large cabbage in two, slice and wash, put it into boiling water with salt, and when partly cooked, add some potatoes cut into smallish pieces. Cook all together for about an hour; then drain. Put some fat in a saucepan, slice an onion, brown it in the fat, add the cabbage and potato, and stew all together for ten minutes; then dish. Bake some sausages in the oven and dish them round the cabbage; serve hot.
Another way (easier) Stew the cabbages, potato and sausages all together and dish up neatly.
A plain Flemish winter dish of the sort collected from Belgian refugees during the First World War. The original assumes a coal range and a cook who knows what a finished cabbage looks like; a few adjustments bring it up to date.
- The hour of boilingAn hour in salted water will reduce sliced cabbage to grey pulp by modern taste. Give the cabbage 8-10 minutes, add the potatoes and cook a further 12-15 until they yield to a knife, then drain well.
- Drain thoroughlyThis is the hinge. Wet cabbage will not take on any colour or flavour from the onion and fat, and the finished dish turns watery. Let it sit in the colander and press lightly before it goes into the pan.
- "Some fat"In a Belgian kitchen of this date this would most likely have been lard, bacon fat, or beef dripping. Butter with a spoonful of oil works; fat rendered from the sausages is another option, though the recipe cooks them separately in the oven.
- Sausages in the ovenBake at 400F for 25-30 minutes, turning once, to an internal 160F for pork. Fresh Belgian-style sausage is coarse fresh pork; a plain butcher's pork sausage or a bratwurst stands in well.
- Mashing or notStewed together for ten minutes, the potato may begin to break down and bind the cabbage, though the recipe itself does not call for mashing. If you want it looser, cut the potatoes larger and stir gently.
- The second methodThe one-pot version needs the sausages browned first, then buried in the cabbage and potato to finish; otherwise they release fat without ever taking colour.
- YieldA large cabbage with potatoes and a pound of sausage feeds four as a main course. Season generously at the end with salt, pepper and a grating of nutmeg, which is usual in the Low Countries.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in England in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees, and its plainest entries are the most telling: cabbage, potato, onion, a little fat and whatever sausage the butcher had. Dishes of this shape run right across Flanders and the Netherlands under various names, the potato mashed into the greens with fat and served with a boiled or baked sausage, and they belong to a cooking tradition built on what keeps in a cellar through winter. The two methods here, one careful and one described simply as "easier," are a fair picture of the book's character: recipes dictated from memory by cooks who had left their kitchens behind, with no weights and no times worth trusting, but a clear sense of what the dish should taste like.