Home › Vegetables › Fried Cabbage
Fried Cabbage
Cut the cabbage very fine, on a slaw cutter, if possible; salt and pepper, stir well, and let stand five minutes. Have an iron kettle smoking hot, drop one table-spoon lard into it, then the cabbage, stirring briskly until quite tender; send to table immediately. One half cup sweet cream, and three table-spoons vinegar-the vinegar added after the cream has been well stirred, and after taken from the stove, is an agreeable change. When properly done an invalid can eat it without injury, and there is no offensive odor from cooking. Mrs. J. T. Liggett, Detroit, Mich.
A fast dry-heat sauté rather than the long boil that gave nineteenth-century cabbage its reputation. The whole method depends on the pan being hotter than seems reasonable and the cabbage being cut thin enough to cook in a few minutes.
- The hinge: heat and speedThe kettle must be genuinely smoking before the lard goes in, and the cabbage must be moving constantly. Cabbage releases a lot of water; if the pan is only warm it stews in its own liquid, which is exactly the sulphurous result the recipe is written against.
- Cut fineA slaw cutter is a mandoline. Aim for shreds about 1/8 inch — thin enough that they wilt in three or four minutes. A food processor slicing disc does the same job; a knife works but keep the shreds even or you get scorched wisps alongside raw ribs.
- The salting stepSalting and letting the cabbage stand five minutes draws out surface moisture. Squeeze or blot the shreds before they hit the fat, or the pan temperature drops the moment they land.
- One tablespoon of fat is not a typoFor a medium head this is a very lean sauté. Lard suits it, as does bacon fat, butter, or a neutral oil. Use a cast-iron or carbon-steel skillet — "kettle" in period usage usually meant a deep pot, but the single spoonful of fat and the brisk stirring here point to a heavy shallow pan.
- Sweet creamSweet cream means unsoured, ordinary cream, as opposed to the cultured cream common in period kitchens. Heavy or whipping cream is the equivalent.
- Cream and vinegar orderStir the half cup of cream through first, then pull the pan off the heat and add the three tablespoons of vinegar. Vinegar into hot cream on the burner can curdle it; off the heat it thickens into a light sweet-sour dressing. Cider vinegar is the likely period choice.
- "Quite tender"Three to five minutes of brisk stirring. The shreds should be limp with some browned edges and still have bite. Past about eight minutes it collapses and the smell the recipe promises to avoid arrives.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; the half cup of cream and three tablespoons of vinegar suit roughly one medium head, which will serve about four as a side. Serve straight from the pan — it slumps and weeps within a few minutes of standing.
Fried cabbage of this kind sits at the meeting point of two traditions common in Midwestern and Southern kitchens of the 1880s: German and Pennsylvania-Dutch sweet-sour cabbage, and the general American habit of finishing vegetables with cream. The contributor's note that "an invalid can eat it without injury, and there is no offensive odor from cooking" is the tell. Boiled cabbage was widely regarded in period household manuals as both indigestible and a nuisance to the house, and cookbooks of the era repeat instructions for long boiling in several changes of water, sometimes with a crust of bread in the pot to absorb the smell. Mrs. Liggett's answer is the opposite approach — cut it fine, cook it hot and fast, get it to the table. The smell, at least, has a clear cause: sulphur compounds released as cabbage cells break down, which build up the longer the cooking runs. The Dixie Cook-Book, like many compiled community cookbooks of the period, credits its contributors by name and city, and Detroit appears among them often enough to show how loosely "Dixie" was drawn by the publishers.