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Cabbage and Cream
Take a well blanched cabbage, drain, cool and chop it up fine, placing it in a saucepan with a couple of ounces of butter, a little salt, pepper and grated nutmeg; add tablespoonful of flour, stirring well, and then pour in a breakfast cupful of cream. Reduce until the cabbage and cream are thoroughly mixed, say about forty-five minutes; arrange on a hot dish, and serve.
A short entry that assumes a cook already has a pot of blanched cabbage standing by. Two details carry the dish: how far the cabbage is cooked before it meets the butter, and how patiently the cream is reduced.
- "Well blanched" means fully tenderIn cookery of this period blanching a vegetable commonly meant boiling it until soft rather than the brief 30-second dip used today for freezing. Figure 8-12 minutes for shredded cabbage or 15-20 for wedges, then drain hard and cool before chopping, or the finished dish will be watery.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup: reckon 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Use a generous cup of heavy cream, which reduces without breaking.
- The flourStir the tablespoon of flour into the buttered cabbage and let it cook a minute or two before the cream goes in. Adding cream to raw flour is what produces the pasty taste this style of dish is sometimes accused of.
- Forty-five minutes is real, but keep it lowThe time is for evaporating water out of the cabbage and thickening the cream, not for cooking the vegetable further. Hold it at a bare simmer and stir often; cream with flour in it scorches on the bottom of the pan quickly, and a browned bottom will flavor the whole dish.
- Salt lastA long reduction concentrates whatever salt you started with, and the cabbage may already have taken up salt in its blanching water. Season lightly at the start and correct at the end.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use a restrained amount. Nutmeg with cream and a cabbage-family vegetable is a standard French pairing, and it is doing the work that a sauce would otherwise do.
- YieldOne medium head, about 2 lb trimmed, gives four to six side servings. It is rich enough that a small spoonful per plate is the intent.
- ServingWarm the dish, as instructed. A reduced cream binding stiffens and looks broken the moment it hits a cold plate.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf from its opening in 1893 and then of the Waldorf-Astoria, which dates from 1897, and the cookbook published under his name in 1896 is a compilation drawn from the world of a large French-trained American hotel kitchen. Dishes like this one are the vegetable half of that repertoire: cabbage, treated by the same method a French kitchen would apply to anything a la creme - blanch, bind with a little flour and butter, reduce in cream, finish with nutmeg. The point of putting it in a hotel book is precisely that it is cabbage; the technique is what elevates it. The measurement in "breakfast cupful" is a reminder that these recipes were written for cooks who measured with the china on hand rather than with graduated cups.