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Cabbage Scallop
Season more highly any left-over cooked cabbage, mix with white sauce No. 1 A (see page 68) in the proportion of one cup of sauce to two of cabbage. Butter a baking-dish, put in the mixture, and cover with buttered crumbs, using one tablespoonful melted butter to one-third cup of dried and rolled bread-crumbs. Bake in a quick oven until the sauce bubbles through the crumbs and they are brown. Individual ramekins may be used instead of the larger dish.
A straightforward gratin of yesterday's cabbage, held together by a cup of white sauce. The only real variables are the sauce and the heat.
- "A quick oven"Conventionally glossed as a hot oven, somewhere around 400-450F; the book itself gives no figures. The dish is already cooked through, so the oven is only there to brown the crumbs and bring the sauce to a bubble — expect roughly 15 to 20 minutes in a shallow dish, less in ramekins.
- White sauce No. 1 AThe cross-reference is to the book's own basic white sauce, butter and flour cooked together with milk stirred in and simmered until thickened; the exact proportions are on page 68 and should be read there. Note that 1 tablespoon each butter and flour per cup of milk gives a thin sauce, while a medium bechamel runs closer to 2 tablespoons of each.
- ProportionsTwo cups cabbage to one cup sauce, as the recipe states. Two cups of chopped cooked cabbage is perhaps half a small head, depending on how finely it is cut and how well drained; the finished dish serves two or three as a side, or four in small ramekins.
- "Season more highly"Left-over boiled cabbage is usually flat. Salt, plenty of black or white pepper, a little dry mustard or a grating of nutmeg, and a spoonful of grated hard cheese all belong here even though the original does not name them.
- Drain it firstCabbage holds water, and any that leaks out will thin the sauce and steam the crumbs instead of browning them. Press the cabbage in a sieve or blot it before mixing, and chop it coarsely so the sauce can get through it.
- Dried and rolled crumbsThese are stale bread dried out in a low oven and crushed fine — closer to fine dried breadcrumbs than to soft fresh crumbs. Fresh crumbs work but need a little more butter.
- RamekinsSmall dishes give more crust per portion and heat through more quickly than the large dish. Set them on a baking sheet and watch the tops so the crumbs do not go past brown.
Recipes like this belong to the era when a household cooked a whole cabbage at once and was then obliged to account for it. The Cook Book of Left Overs sits in a long line of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American domestic manuals built on the premise that waste was a moral failing as much as an economic one, and its method here is the standard rescue: bind the tired vegetable in white sauce, cap it with buttered crumbs, and send it back to the table transformed. The word "scallop" — also spelled escallop, and generally traced to the old sense of cooking something in a scallop shell — had by this period simply come to mean any dish baked in a sauce under a crumb topping, with no shellfish involved. The instruction to "season more highly" is the honest admission at the centre of the book: reheated food has lost something, and the cook is expected to put it back.