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Vegetable Hodge-Podge
This is something fine, if you are so fortunate as to have a waterless heavy aluminum oval roaster or large kettle.
Get a small tender cabbage, remove outer leaves, cut in eighths; wash; place on the bottom (in center) of the roaster; surround with peeled and halved carrots; over the carrots place a layer of leeks or small white onions, peeled and halved, also one large green pepper, sliced; add a light sprinkling of salt over all. Then peel and quarter three or four willow-twig or greening apples; place over the cabbage in center of roaster.
Sprinkle apples generously with puffed raisins, 1 tablespoon sugar and ¼ teaspoon nutmeg; ½ cup of water may be added. Cover tightly and cook on a medium flame. When the roaster is thoroughly heated, turn the flame low. Cook for one hour; do not remove the cover while cooking; the vegetables will retain their individual flavors.
Butter may be added to the vegetables when served. This is a meal in itself.
A one-pot steamed vegetable dish that depends entirely on a tight seal and low heat. Everything else is flexible.
- The hinge: keep the lid onThe whole method is low-pressure steaming in the vegetables' own moisture, so lifting the lid to check vents the steam and stalls the cooking. Use a heavy pot whose lid actually seats — a Dutch oven or a thick-bottomed casserole with a snug lid does what the "waterless roaster" did.
- Waterless cookwareThis meant heavy cast aluminum with a close-fitting lid designed to seal, the sort of set often sold direct to households rather than through shops, as a way to cook vegetables without boiling out flavor. Any heavy pot with a good lid substitutes; add the optional ½ cup water rather than skipping it, since modern lids leak more.
- Heat control"Medium flame" until the pot is hot through, then as low as your burner will hold. A heat diffuser is worth using if your lowest setting still scorches.
- Willow-twig and greening applesBoth are old American varieties — firm, tart and slow to collapse. Granny Smith, Braeburn or Northern Spy behave the same way; avoid Red Delicious or Gala, which will be applesauce in an hour.
- Puffed raisinsRaisins soaked in hot water (or steamed briefly) until swollen. Ten minutes in just-boiled water and drained is enough; dry raisins added straight in will pull moisture from the apples.
- TimingThe recipe wants a full hour of gentle steam with the lid undisturbed. If your vegetables are cut small and you doubt they need the whole hour, judge by the smell and by the pot rather than by opening it early; at the end the carrots should yield to a knife tip and the cabbage wedges still hold together.
- SeasoningThe salt sprinkle during cooking is light, and the recipe finishes the dish with butter at the table. Black pepper or a squeeze of lemon over the vegetables at serving would do it no harm.
- YieldA small cabbage, carrots, leeks and the three or four apples the recipe calls for will make roughly four servings as the "meal in itself" the recipe claims, or six as a side.
Hodge-podge is the English form of hotchpot or hochepot, from the Old French for shaking things together in a pot, and well before the sixteenth century it already meant both a mixed stew and, in law, the pooling of property into one lot. Scots hotch-potch is a mutton and summer-vegetable broth; this version has dropped the meat entirely and leaned on apples, raisins, sugar and nutmeg in the center of the pot — a sweet-and-savory arrangement that reads as Central European more than British. Its real period marker is the equipment. The specified "waterless heavy aluminum oval roaster" belongs to the interwar vogue for sealed cast-aluminum cookware, promoted on the argument, then novel to home cooks, that boiling vegetables in water leached out their minerals and flavor. It is tempting to read recipes like this one as demonstrations of what the pot could do, with the insistence that the vegetables "retain their individual flavors" as the sales pitch showing through, though that is inference rather than documented fact.