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Boiled Cabbage
Take off outside leaves. Cut in quarters, and remove all tough stalk., Soak in cold water and cook in an uncovered vessel in boiling salted water, to which is added 1/4 teaspoon soda, to eliminate the disagreeable odor in cooking. Cook from 30 minutes to one hour. Drain, season and serve.
A short entry that reflects turn-of-the-century thinking about cabbage: cook it long, cook it uncovered, and dose the water with baking soda. Two of those three instructions are worth ignoring.
- The timing is the thingThirty minutes to an hour turns cabbage grey, slack and sulphurous. Quartered cabbage needs 8 to 12 minutes in a large volume of boiling salted water; shredded, 4 to 6. Test the thickest part of the core with a knife tip and pull it out while the leaves still have some bite.
- Skip the sodaThe quarter-teaspoon of baking soda does soften cabbage and mute the smell, but it does so by breaking down cell walls and it destroys most of the vitamin C. It also leaves a faintly soapy, slippery texture. Short cooking accomplishes the same odour control, since the sulphur compounds build up mainly with long heating.
- Why the lid stays offThis part is sound. An uncovered pot lets volatile sulphur compounds escape rather than condensing back into the water, and it keeps the acids from concentrating and dulling the colour. Use plenty of water and keep it at a fast boil.
- The cold soakThe recipe calls only for a plain cold-water soak, with no time given. Soaking cabbage, sometimes in salted water, was common advice at the time because market cabbage could harbour insects in the inner leaves. With modern produce it is optional, though a soak does crisp a limp head.
- "Season and serve"In this period that would most often mean butter, salt and pepper, though cream and vinegar dressings also appear in books of the era. A splash of cider vinegar or a grating of nutmeg at the end is period-appropriate and helps a plain boiled vegetable.
- Drain properlyCabbage holds a surprising amount of water in its folds. Drain in a colander and press gently, or the butter will slide off and pool on the plate.
- YieldNo quantity is given. A 2 lb head, quartered, serves four to six as a side dish.
Boiled cabbage of this kind is the plainest possible entry in a vegetable chapter, and its presence in a bride's cook book is the point: these books were compiled for young women setting up a first household, and they began with the cheap, storable staples a new cook would face daily. The baking soda trick was widely printed in American and British domestic manuals through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alongside advice to boil a crust of bread with the cabbage for the same purpose. It fell out of favour as home economists documented how much soda cost in vitamin content and texture, and as shorter cooking times for green vegetables became standard teaching.