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Friday's Feast
Cook a medium cabbage till it is tender, and all the better if you can cook it in some soup. When tender, mince it and rub it through a sieve. Boil at the same time three pounds of chestnuts, skin them, keep ten whole, and rub the others through the sieve, adding a little milk to make a puree. Mix the puree with the cabbage, adding salt, pepper, and a lump of butter size of a chestnut. Press it into a mold and cook it in a double saucepan for quarter of an hour. Take it out and decorate with the whole chestnuts.
A meatless purée of cabbage and chestnut set in a mould — plain food, but it lives or dies on how dry you get the cabbage.
- Squeeze the cabbage hardThe hinge of the dish. Boiled cabbage holds an enormous amount of water, and a wet purée will never hold a mould shape. After cooking, drain and press it in a clean towel until no more liquid comes out, then sieve it.
- Cooking it in soupSimmering the cabbage in stock rather than water is worth doing; a light chicken or vegetable broth adds most of the seasoning the recipe otherwise lacks. Since the dish is meant for a fast day, vegetable stock keeps it in the spirit of the thing.
- Three pounds of chestnutsThe recipe does not say whether this is weighed in the shell; if it is, expect roughly 2 to 2 1/4 lb of peeled nut, and rather less once you set ten aside whole. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts work here — about 2 lb.
- Skinning themScore an X through the shell of each nut, boil or roast briefly, and peel while hot. Both the shell and the bitter inner pellicle must come off, and both cling once the nut cools, so work in small batches and keep the rest in the hot water.
- Rub through a sieveA drum sieve or food mill gives the dry, mealy texture intended. A food processor will do it faster but can turn chestnut gluey if overworked; pulse rather than run it.
- A lump of butter size of a chestnutRoughly a tablespoon, about 15 g. Given the quantity of purée this is a lean dish by design — Friday food — but half a stick will not go amiss if you are serving it as a side rather than a fast-day main.
- Double saucepanIn effect gentle indirect heat: the filled mould set over or in barely simmering water, covered. Fifteen minutes will do little more than heat the mixture through, so expect it to turn out as a soft dome rather than a firm, sliceable loaf.
- UnmouldingButter the mould well and line the base with a disc of baking parchment. Let it stand two or three minutes off the heat, run a knife round, then invert onto a warm dish. Arrange the ten reserved chestnuts around the crown while everything is still hot.
- Yield and servingEnough for six or more as a side, four as the meatless main it was meant to be. A grating of nutmeg suits it, and it goes well beside roast pork, goose or game once the fast day is over.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and the dishes carry the marks of a frugal cuisine remembered under duress. The title here points to Catholic Friday abstinence from meat, still widely observed in Belgium at the time, which produced a whole category of substantial vegetable dishes designed to satisfy without flesh. Cabbage and chestnut are a natural pairing of the northern countryside, where cabbage kept through the winter and chestnuts were a cheap autumn crop, though the claim that chestnut served as a bulk staple of the Ardennes is more than the book supports; moulding the two together over water gives the shape of a dressed entremets to ingredients that cost almost nothing. The instruction to cook the cabbage in soup is plain household economy.