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Escalloped Cabbage
Cut one-half boiled cabbage in pieces; put in buttered baking-dish, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and add one cup White Sauce I. Lift cabbage with fork, that it may be well mixed with sauce, cover with buttered crumbs, and bake until crumbs are brown.
A straightforward gratin that depends entirely on the cabbage being properly drained. The original assumes you already have boiled cabbage and a pan of white sauce on hand.
- White Sauce IFarmer's White Sauce I is built on roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, with salt and pepper to season (exact amounts vary between editions) — a standard medium bechamel. Melt the butter, stir in the flour, cook a minute without colouring, then add the milk gradually and cook until it thickens.
- Buttered crumbsElsewhere in the book these are 1 cup stale soft bread crumbs tossed with 2 to 4 tablespoons melted butter. Dry packaged crumbs will absorb the butter unevenly; torn day-old bread pulsed briefly is closer to the intent.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given in the recipe. Bake at 400F for 15 to 20 minutes — long enough to brown the crumbs and heat through, since everything in the dish is already cooked.
- Drain hardThis is the hinge. Boiled cabbage holds a great deal of water, and any of it left behind will thin the sauce into a puddle under the crumbs. Press the cabbage in a colander, or spread it on a towel, before it goes in the dish.
- Don't overboil the cabbageCookbooks of the period commonly give boiling times of twenty minutes or more for cabbage, which leaves it grey and sulphurous. Eight to ten minutes in salted water is enough, and it will finish cooking in the oven.
- "One-half cabbage"Half a medium head, boiled, gives roughly 3 to 4 cups of cut cabbage — the right amount for a cup of sauce in a small baking dish. Serves four as a side.
- Lifting with a forkThe recipe gives its own reason: so the cabbage is well mixed with the sauce. Lift and turn the pieces so the sauce runs between the layers rather than sitting on top; a fork is also gentler than a spoon on already-boiled cabbage.
Escalloped dishes fill several pages of American cookbooks of this period — a layer of cooked food, a cup of white sauce, buttered crumbs on top, into the oven. The word is a variant of "scalloped," generally traced to food baked and served in a scallop shell, which by the nineteenth century had loosened to mean anything cooked in a shallow dish with sauce and crumbs. In Fannie Farmer's book the technique functions as a template: once a cook has mastered White Sauce I and buttered crumbs, the same method serves cabbage, onions, tomatoes, oysters or leftover fish. Cabbage in particular benefited, since the vegetable was cheap and available all winter from the root cellar, and a cream sauce and browned crumb topping did a good deal to make a plain boiled head worth putting on the table.