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Cabbage Soup
Take a good white heart cabbage, wash and trim off the outer leaves, chop it into fine shreds, and put it in a stewpan with a quart of water, boiling until quite tender. Put the cabbage and the water into a quart of mutton broth, adding salt and pepper to taste, and boil once more. When ready to be served, stir in a teaspoonful of fresh butter and two or three small lumps of sugar. The soup should be quite thick.
A plain two-vessel soup: cabbage cooked in water, then finished in broth. Almost everything depends on the cabbage and the broth, since there is no thickener, no aromatics and no fat beyond the final spoon of butter.
- White heart cabbageThis means a firm, tightly packed white or Dutch cabbage, the kind sold for coleslaw, rather than savoy or napa. One head of about 2 lb, trimmed, gives roughly the bulk the recipe assumes.
- Don't boil it to death"quite tender" in a quart of water takes 10 to 15 minutes for fine shreds. Past that, the cabbage turns sulphurous and grey and the soup takes on the smell that gave boiled cabbage its reputation.
- Mutton brothGenuine mutton stock is hard to buy; lamb stock, or a lamb shoulder bone simmered with an onion, gives the same slightly gamey backbone. Beef or chicken stock works but produces a noticeably milder soup than Oscar intended.
- The cooking water stays inBoth the cabbage and its quart of water go into the quart of broth, so you finish with about two quarts of liquid. Season only at that point, since the broth may already be salted.
- Lumps of sugarA small lump of period loaf sugar is comparable to a modern sugar cube, so two or three lumps amount to something like two to three teaspoons. It is there to balance the faint bitterness of the cabbage, not to sweeten the soup; add it at the end and taste.
- "Quite thick"The body comes entirely from the volume of shredded cabbage, not from flour or cream. If it looks thin, reduce it uncovered for a few minutes rather than adding a roux, which would change the character of the dish.
- Finishing butterStir the butter in off the heat so it emulsifies rather than breaking into a slick. A teaspoon is modest for two quarts; a tablespoon is closer to modern taste.
- YieldAbout two quarts, serving four to six as a first course.
Cabbage soup of this kind is among the plainer things in Oscar Tschirky's book. The pattern " cabbage cooked until tender, then finished in mutton broth with a little sugar and butter " belongs to the northern European peasant tradition that reached American cookbooks through both British and German channels; the sugar in particular is a long-standing trick for softening the sulphurous edge of brassicas, and is familiar from German and Scandinavian cabbage cookery. Mutton broth was a common household stock in the nineteenth century, when mature sheep were more commonly eaten than young lamb, and its near-disappearance from American markets is one reason this soup tastes different today than it did in 1896.