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Delicate Cabbage
Remove all defective leaves, quarter and cut as for coarse slaw, cover well with cold water, and let remain several hours before cooking, then drain and put into pot with enough boiling water to cover; boil until thoroughly cooked (which will generally require about forty-five minutes), add salt ten or fifteen minutes before removing from fire, and when done, take up into a colander, press out the water well, and season with butter and pepper. This is a good dish to serve with corned meats, but should not be cooked with them; if preferred, however, it may be seasoned by adding some of the liquor and fat from the boiling meat to the cabbage while cooking. Or, cut the cabbage in two, remove the hard stock, let stand in cold water two hours, tie in thin netting or piece of muslin, and boil in salted water for a longer time than when it is cut finely. Drain, remove, and serve in a dish with drawn butter or a cream dressing poured over it. - Mrs. E. T. Carson.
A plain boiled cabbage from a period when cabbage was boiled far longer than anyone does now. The method is sound; the clock is not.
- The forty-five minutesShredded cabbage in boiling water is tender in 6-10 minutes, and a halved head in 12-15. Three-quarters of an hour reduces it to grey pulp and gives the sulphurous smell time to fill the kitchen. Cook to just-tender and taste as you go.
- The cold-water soakThe several-hour soak was probably insect control as much as anything, back when cabbages came from the garden with tenants. A short soak in cold water, salted if you like, still flushes out anything hiding in the leaves; twenty minutes is plenty for supermarket cabbage.
- Salt at the endThe instruction to salt ten or fifteen minutes before the finish is worth ignoring. Salt the water from the start, as for pasta; it seasons the leaves through rather than sitting on the surface.
- "Cut as for coarse slaw"Quarter the head, cut out the core, and shred across the grain about a quarter-inch thick. Finer than that and it collapses.
- Pressing in the colanderThis step matters more than the boiling time. Boiled cabbage holds a surprising amount of water, and unpressed it will thin the butter into a puddle. Press firmly with the back of a spoon, then dress.
- Cooking with corned meatThe warning not to boil the cabbage in with the meat is good sense, since the cabbage would otherwise be in the pot far longer than it needs. Ladling some of the salty, fatty cooking liquor over the cabbage as it cooks gives the same flavour without the ruin.
- Netting and muslinCheesecloth tied loosely, or a wide steamer basket, does the job of holding a halved head together. Tie it slackly so water circulates.
- Drawn butterIn nineteenth-century American books this means a butter sauce thickened with a little flour and water or the cooking water, not simply melted butter. Roughly a tablespoon of flour to a tablespoon or two of butter cooked together, then a cup of liquid whisked in.
- YieldA medium head of about two pounds serves four to six as a side dish.
Boiled cabbage with corned beef is one of the oldest fixtures of the Anglo-American table. The care Mrs. Carson takes to keep the cabbage out of the meat pot reflects a genuine late-nineteenth-century argument about vegetable cookery: cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s increasingly complained that vegetables boiled to death alongside meat were indigestible and tasteless, and "delicate" in a recipe title of this period may well signal a claim to refinement over the older farmhouse method. The Dixie Cook Book gathered contributions under the names of the women who sent them in, which is why this page carries an attribution rather than an author. The forty-five minutes still looks brutal to us, though the period view more commonly recorded was that cabbage itself was indigestible and that long boiling remedied it.