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Boiled Cabbages
Remove the outside leaves of the cabbages and place in salted water to cleanse them, then put them into a saucepan of boiling water salted, and boil fast; do not use a lid for the saucepan. When done, strain well, cut into quarters, serving them at once. When boiling it is well to change the water every ten minutes, as this produces a better flavor.
A bare-bones method from Oscar Tschirky's kitchen, written for cooks who already knew what a cooked cabbage should look like. Two points in it are worth arguing with.
- TimingNo time is given. A whole trimmed green cabbage takes roughly 15-20 minutes at a hard boil; quartered first, 8-10 minutes. Test the core with a knife tip, not the leaves.
- Quarter first, not afterCutting into quarters before boiling gives more even cooking and far easier handling than wrestling a whole scalding head onto a board. The recipe gives no reason for boiling the head whole; keeping it intact until it is cut for the plate may simply have suited service.
- Changing the waterDraining and refilling every ten minutes does mute the sulphurous note, but each change drops the pot off the boil and drags out cooking, which produces more of the sulphur compounds in the first place. A short, hard, uncovered boil in one pot of well-salted water achieves the same end.
- No lidThis part is sound. An open pot lets volatile sulphur compounds escape rather than condensing back into the water, and keeps green cabbage from going drab.
- Salt the water properly"Salted" here means seasoned, not a token pinch: about a tablespoon per four quarts. The soaking water needs only enough salt to draw out grit and any insects from the outer leaves.
- Draining"Strain well" matters more than it sounds. Stand the quarters cut side down in the colander for a minute or press gently, or the water pools out onto the plate.
- Yield and servingOne medium head serves four. The recipe says nothing about accompaniment; boiled cabbage of this period was commonly served plain with butter or alongside boiled corned beef or salt pork.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 Cook Book runs to some nine hundred pages and includes entries this spare throughout; a line or two was evidently enough to remind a working cook of an order of operations. Boiled cabbage sits in the vegetable chapters as plain fare among the terrapin and canvasback, the sort of dish that appeared on hotel menus beside boiled beef. The instruction to change the water repeatedly belongs to a nineteenth-century preoccupation with cabbage's smell; the advice to leave the lid off, common in the same period, is the part still given today.