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Red Cabbage (Take half a red cabbage)
Take half a red cabbage of medium size, chop it very finely and put it in a pan; add a little water, salt, and pepper, three or four potatoes cut in fine slices and five lumps of sugar. Let it all simmer for two hours with the lid on. Then take off the cover and let it reduce. Before serving it, add either a bit of fat pork or some gravy, with a dessert-spoonful of vinegar. Stir it well before sending it to table.
A plain braise that depends on a long, slow, nearly dry cook and a sharp correction at the end. Everything hinges on how much water goes in at the start.
- A little water means a littleTwo or three tablespoons in a heavy pan with a tight lid is enough; the cabbage releases plenty of its own liquid. Too much and you will spend a long time at the reducing stage, boiling away the colour and flavour with it.
- Lumps of sugarFive lumps is somewhere between one and two tablespoons of granulated sugar, depending on the size of the lumps, which was not standardised. That reads sweet, but red cabbage takes sugar well and the vinegar at the end balances it.
- The potatoes are the thickenerSliced thin and cooked two hours, they break down entirely and bind the cabbage into a soft mass. Use a floury variety; waxy potatoes will hold their shape and give you cabbage with potato slices in it instead.
- Colour chemistryRed cabbage pigment turns blue-grey in alkaline conditions and stays red in acid. If your water is hard, a splash of the vinegar at the start rather than all of it at the end will keep the dish looking right, at the cost of slightly longer cooking.
- Two hours is not a misprintModern recipes often stop at forty-five minutes, but the long braise is the point here: the shreds collapse into something almost jammy. Keep the heat very low and check once or twice that it has not caught.
- Fat pork or gravyA piece of salt pork belly or streaky bacon, diced and rendered, is the usual reading; stir it in with its fat. Failing that, a few spoonfuls of roast meat juices. Either way it is added at the end, not cooked in from the start.
- YieldHalf a medium cabbage with three or four potatoes serves four as a side dish, most obviously with pork, sausage, or game.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion, and its character is set by that: short, frugal instructions for dishes remembered rather than copied out of a professional manual. Sweet-sour red cabbage — rode kool in Flemish, chou rouge in Wallonia — belongs to a band of cookery running across the Low Countries and into Germany and Denmark, where sugar and vinegar are used both to season the cabbage and to hold its colour. What suggests, though it cannot prove, that this is domestic rather than restaurant cooking is the potato, thrown in to thicken and to stretch the dish, in place of the apple a grander kitchen might use. Red cabbage keeps for months in a cool cellar, which is why it appears so often in winter cooking of this region, and why a recipe like this one could be recalled from memory by anyone who had kept a household there.</p>