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Red Cabbage with Chestnuts
I red cabbage
½ cup water
1 tablespoon drippings
Salt and pepper
½ cup melted grape jelly
French chestnuts
Select a nice red cabbage, remove the outer leaves and soak for a short time in cold water. Drain, and slice in thin shreds. Melt the fat in a saucepan, add the jelly and the cabbage, the water, salt and pepper. Cook very slowly until tender.
At the same time, boil some French chestnuts; take off the skin and add them to the cabbage. Cook all slowly for about two hours, until the liquid has evaporated.
A braise that depends on acid and long, gentle heat; the ingredient list is loose by modern standards, so a few specifics help.
- The missing acidRed cabbage needs acid to keep its colour and to soften without turning grey-blue. The grape jelly supplies mostly sugar, though jellies are themselves acidic; a tablespoon or two of cider or red wine vinegar added at the start helps hold the shreds at a clear crimson.
- "1 red cabbage"Assume 2 to 2½ lb, which shreds down to about 3 quarts loose. That fills a 4-quart pot at the start and cooks down to roughly a quarter of its volume.
- DrippingsMost likely whatever savoury fat the kitchen had saved, beef, pork or bacon. Bacon fat or butter both work; a single tablespoon for a whole cabbage is modest, and two is not out of keeping.
- French chestnutsImported European sweet chestnuts (Castanea sativa), the large single-kernelled sort sold as marrons. Fresh ones need scoring, boiling 15-20 minutes, then peeling while hot, or the inner skin will not come away. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are a fair substitute; add them in the last 30 minutes so they do not disintegrate. Reckon on 8 oz.
- Two hours, uncovered at the endThe instruction to cook until the liquid evaporates is the point of the dish. Braise covered for most of the time, then take the lid off so the sugar and juices reduce to a glaze. Half a cup of water will not last two hours in an open pan; check and add a splash as needed.
- Grape jellyHalf a cup is sweet for a modern palate accustomed to less sugar in savoury food. Start with a third of a cup, taste near the end, and adjust. Red currant jelly is the more usual French choice and less cloying.
- YieldServes six as a side dish. It reheats better than it keeps fresh, and is at its best the second day.
Braised red cabbage with chestnuts belongs to the cold-weather cooking of northern and eastern France and, in near-identical form, to Germany, Belgium and Alsace, where it is the standard accompaniment to goose, duck, pork and game. The sweet-and-tart treatment — long slow cooking — is an old way of handling a vegetable that grows coarse and sulphurous if simply boiled, and the chestnut was the obvious partner because both were autumn keepers available at the same moment. The book's "French chestnuts" reflects a real trade distinction: European sweet chestnuts were imported into the United States as a premium item, and the chestnut blight identified in New York in 1904 would, over the following decades, all but wipe out the native tree, leaving imported nuts to fill the gap.