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Boiled Pickled Pork and Cabbage
Pare, divide, and cut into quarters a medium-sized cabbage, wash well and parboil for about ten minutes, and then place them in a vessel with a pound of well-washed salt pork, three sausages, a branch of celery, an onion, two large carrots, a blade of mace, a bay leaf and a sprig of thyme, half a pinch of pepper, but no salt, and cover over with buttered paper; simmer over a gentle fire for an hour and a half, and then remove the cabbage with a skimmer and place it on a dish, together with the pork and the sausages, laying them on top; garnish the dish with the balance of the vegetables, and serve.
A one-pot boiled dinner in the French potée mould, written for a cook who already knows what salt pork looks like. Two things need translating: the meat and the buttered paper.
- Pickled porkThis is fresh pork belly or shoulder cured in brine, not smoked bacon and not the cured-and-dried salt pork sold for larding. Look for it as salt pork at a butcher, or use a piece of unsmoked green bacon or a small fresh ham hock in brine. Taste the cooking liquid before serving; modern brines vary a good deal in strength, and the recipe specifies no brine of its own to compare with.
- Why no saltThe instruction is deliberate: the pork and the sausages give up enough salt over the hour and a half to season the rest of the pot. Season only at the table.
- Buttered paperA round of parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on one side and laid directly on the food. It is a cartouche: it holds the cabbage under the liquid and lets steam escape slowly, so the pot reduces rather than boils. A tight lid is not the same thing and will give you a wetter dish.
- Blade of maceThe dried outer casing of nutmeg, sold in curled blades. One blade is usually reckoned at somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon of ground mace, though ground mace disperses and cannot be fished out at the end.
- The sausagesPlain fresh pork sausages, uncooked when they go in. Ninety minutes of simmering will make them very soft; if you want them to hold their shape, add them for the last thirty to forty minutes.
- Parboiling the cabbageThe ten-minute blanch is not idle. It draws off the sulphurous edge that a long simmer would otherwise concentrate. Drain the cabbage and discard that water before it goes into the pot.
- Heat and liquid"A gentle fire" means a bare tremble rather than a boil, with nothing over the pot but the paper. The recipe specifies no liquid at all; if you add water or light stock, enough to come roughly two-thirds up the ingredients will do. A hard boil will shred the cabbage quarters and toughen the pork.
- YieldA pound of pork, three sausages and a medium cabbage serve four generously with boiled potatoes and mustard. The strained cooking liquid is worth keeping for soup.
Boiled salt pork with cabbage is one of the oldest ways of eating a pig in northern Europe, and it survives in French regional cooking as potée, in Ireland as bacon and cabbage, and in New England as the boiled dinner. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's book — Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than a chef — suggests, though the compiled collection cannot really settle the question, that a dish of this kind sat comfortably alongside the dining room's grander offerings. The tells here are all professional: the celery, onion, carrot, bay and thyme are a standard aromatic base rather than a list of flavourings, the blade of mace is a survival of older English spicing, and the buttered paper is the cartouche any French-trained cook would have reached for by habit.