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Fowl, Duck, Game, Hare: Cheddar
No. 156. Barbabietola alla Parmigiana (Beetroot) Ingredients: Beetroot, white sauce, Parmesan, Cheddar.
Boil a beetroot till it is quite tender, peel it, cut into slices, put it in a fireproof dish, and cover it with a thick white sauce. Strew a little grated Parmesan and Cheddar over it. Put it in the oven for a few minutes, and serve very hot in the dish.
No. 157. Fave alla Savoiarda (Beans) Ingredients: Beans, stock, a bunch of herbs, Béchamel sauce.
Boil one pound of broad beans in salt and water, skin and cook them in a saucepan with a quarter pint of reduced stock and a bunch of herbs.
Drain them, take out the herbs, and season with two glasses of Béchamel sauce (No. 3).
No. 158. Verze alla Capuccina (Cabbage) Ingredients: Cabbage or greens, anchovies, salt, butter, parsley, gravy, Parmesan.
Boil two cabbages in a good deal of water, and cut them into quarters. Fry two anchovies slightly in butter and chopped parsley, add the cabbages, and at the last three tablespoonsful of good gravy, two tablespoonsful of grated Parmesan, salt and pepper, and when cooked, serve.
Three side dishes from the Italian vegetable chapter, written for a cook who is assumed to have stock and a sauce already made. The measurements are loose and a couple of the boiling times belong to an older idea of a cooked vegetable.
- "A few minutes" in the ovenThe beetroot is already cooked, so the oven is only browning the cheese. A hot oven, or a moment under the grill, will do it; the aim is a blistered top, not a bake. If the sauce has gone on cold it will need longer than the "few minutes" the book allows.
- The white sauce must be thickBeetroot leaks a good deal of liquid once sliced, and a pouring-consistency sauce will turn pink and thin in the dish. Make it stiff enough to hold a line drawn through it with a spoon.
- Cheddar here is a substitution, not traditionCheddar here looks like a substitution rather than tradition -- the pairing of Parmesan with Cheddar most likely reflects what an English kitchen of the book's date had in the larder, though the book does not say so. A firm melting cheese does the job better than a sharp mature Cheddar, which can go oily under heat.
- "Two glasses of Béchamel""Two glasses of Bechamel" -- the book uses "a quarter pint" elsewhere in the same recipe, so "glass" is doing something vaguer; period usage ranges from a wineglassful of about 2 fl oz up to a gill of 5 fl oz. Add the sauce gradually until the beans are coated rather than swimming.
- Skinning the broad beansThe instruction to skin them after boiling points to double-podding: shell the pods, boil briefly, then slip off the grey inner skin of each bean. The book does not say whether its pound is weighed in the pod or shelled, which makes a large difference to the quantity.
- Cabbage in "a good deal of water"Two whole cabbages boiled slack will collapse. Quarter them first and give them 5-8 minutes in heavily salted water, then drain hard before they meet the anchovy butter, or the gravy and Parmesan will not cling.
- The anchovies are the seasoningFry them gently in the butter until they break down completely into a paste; whole fillets left visible read as fishiness rather than depth. Salt the dish only after tasting, since the anchovies and Parmesan both carry plenty.
- YieldThe book gives no yields, and the quantities are not comparable: two whole cabbages will feed considerably more than a single beetroot dressed in white sauce.
These numbered dishes come from The Cook's Decameron (1901), a collection of Italian recipes built round a house party and its menus for English households, and the vegetable chapter is where its purpose shows most clearly: it was arguing that vegetables deserved a sauce and a name of their own rather than being boiled as an afterthought. The titles follow the Italian habit of naming a preparation after a place or a household style. Alla Parmigiana is commonly read as signalling the Parmesan and the gratin finish rather than any particular link to Parma's own cooking; alla Savoiarda points to Savoy, long a crossing point between French and Piedmontese kitchens; and alla Capuccina is often said to refer to the Capuchin friars and their plain, meatless cooking, though the name is just as plausibly traced to cappuccio, a cabbage head, as in cavolo cappuccio. The appearance of Cheddar beside Parmesan is the giveaway that the book was adapting as much as translating for the cooks who bought it.