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Cabbage in Milk
Chop the cabbage fine, having soaked it for one hour before chopping. Boil until tender in plenty of water, usually twenty-five minutes if the boiling is slow. Drain well, cover with milk, and when hot, thicken to a cream with a little flour rubbed to a smooth paste with a small spoon of butter. Boil one minute, stirring well; add salt and pepper, and serve. This is the most delicate way of cooking cabbage.
A creamed cabbage built on a quick beurre manié rather than a separate white sauce. The whole point is a short second cooking in milk, so keep the boil brief.
- The soakSoaking cabbage before cooking is called for in a number of period cookbooks, usually to draw out insects and freshen limp market cabbage; this recipe does not say what kind of water. With modern cabbage it is optional; a rinse and a trim of the core is generally enough, though a soak may crisp a head that has been in the refrigerator a week.
- Boiling timeTwenty-five minutes will reduce finely chopped cabbage to grey mush and drive off the sulphurous compounds into the room. Eight to ten minutes in plenty of well-salted boiling water gives tender cabbage that still has body.
- Drain hardThis is the hinge. Cabbage holds a great deal of water, and any left behind will thin the milk and refuse to thicken. Press it in the colander, or spread it on a towel for a minute.
- "Thicken to a cream"The flour-and-butter paste is handled like a beurre manié, worked in off the boil in small pieces so it disperses. A tablespoon each of flour and butter to a cup of milk gives a light sauce; a heavier coating sauce takes closer to two tablespoons of flour. What "a small spoon of butter" meant is not fixed — anywhere from a teaspoon to a tablespoon.
- Boil one minuteNot an arbitrary number. Flour-thickened milk needs a short boil to lose its raw starch taste and reach full thickness, but longer risks scorching on the bottom of the pan. Stir continuously.
- Milk quantityNone is given; the recipe says only to cover the cabbage. For a medium head, a cup or so of milk will moisten the drained cabbage, though covering it outright would take more; err on the low side, as the cabbage releases more liquid as it sits.
- YieldA medium head of cabbage, roughly 2 lb trimmed, serves four to six as a side dish. Best served straight from the pan, as it stiffens and separates on standing.
Creamed vegetables of this kind appear in American cookbooks from the 1870s through the 1920s, and the Butterick book — issued by the pattern company as part of its wider domestic-instruction publishing — is squarely in that tradition. Milk and a flour-butter thickening softened the strong flavour of boiled cabbage, a vegetable that kept all winter in a root cellar. The claim that this is "the most delicate way of cooking cabbage" reflects a period preference for muting rather than concentrating vegetable flavour; the soak and the long boil this recipe calls for were aimed at the same end. Cabbage itself was among the cheapest of vegetables.