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Tomato Sauce (Teaspoon salt Mix beef)
½ teaspoon salt Mix beef and rice, and add salt, pepper, and cayenne. Cook cabbage leaves two minutes in boiling water to cover. In each leaf put two tablespoons mixture, and fold leaf to enclose mixture. Cook one hour in Tomato Sauce.
Tomato Sauce. Brown four tablespoons butter, add five tablespoons flour, and pour on gradually one and one-half cups each Brown Stock and stewed and strained tomatoes. Add one slice onion, one slice carrot, a bit of bay leaf, a sprig of parsley, four cloves, three-fourths teaspoon salt, one-fourth teaspoon pepper, and a few grains cayenne. Cook ten minutes, and strain.
The page has been cut mid-ingredient-list, so the stuffed cabbage rolls arrive without their quantities; only the tomato sauce is complete. The proportions below are reconstructed from the method itself, and where the original is silent it is said so plainly.
- The missing ingredientsAll that survives of the filling list is "1½ teaspoon salt." A workable filling for one medium head of cabbage is about 1 lb chopped raw or leftover cooked beef to 1 cup cooked rice, seasoned with the salt, pepper and a few grains of cayenne. Treat these as inferred, not as Farmer's own figures.
- Two minutes is for pliability, not cookingThe blanch is only meant to make the leaves fold without cracking. Thick-ribbed outer leaves may need three or four minutes, or the rib can be shaved flat with a knife instead.
- Brown StockThe book's own preparation: beef and bones browned before simmering, giving a dark, gelatinous liquid. A good unsalted beef stock stands in, though you may want to reduce it so it has body; the sauce's salt should then be added by taste.
- Browning the butter and flourThis is a brown roux. Cook the butter until it smells nutty and the flour until it takes a light hazelnut colour before any liquid goes in — five tablespoons flour to four of butter is a stiff paste and scorches quickly over high heat.
- Stewed and strained tomatoesThis meant tomatoes cooked down and pushed through a sieve to remove seeds and skin. Canned tomato purée or passata is the direct equivalent; do not use tomato paste, which is far more concentrated.
- Cook ten minutes, and strainThe onion, carrot, bay, parsley and cloves are aromatics only and all come out. Four whole cloves in three cups of sauce is assertive by modern taste; three is plenty.
- The hour in sauceAn hour of simmering assumes raw beef in the filling and a stovetop pot with the rolls barely covered. Keep it at a bare tremble and add a little stock if the sauce tightens — the flour-thickened sauce catches on the bottom easily. A covered 325°F oven does the same job with less watching.
- YieldOne head of cabbage at two tablespoons of filling per leaf gives roughly 12 to 16 rolls, or four servings. The sauce quantity given is about right for that number.
Stuffed cabbage is one of the oldest ways of stretching a small amount of meat, and versions run from the Levantine mahshi through the Polish gołąbki and Hungarian töltött káposzta to the Alsatian and German recipes that reached American cookbooks by way of nineteenth-century immigration. This version is anchored not to any national tradition but to the sauce — a straightforward brown roux built on the book's own Brown Stock, seasoned with the carrot-onion-bay-clove combination that recurs in its other sauces. That is the Boston Cooking School method in miniature: learn the mother sauce, then attach dishes to it. Canned tomatoes were widely sold by the end of the nineteenth century, though 'stewed and strained' generally describes a step the cook performed at home.