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Stuffed Cabbage
Take a large, fresh cabbage and cut out heart; fill vacancy with stuffing made of cooked chicken or veal, chopped very fine and highly seasoned and rolled into balls with yolk of egg. Then tie cabbage firmly together (some tie a cloth around it), and boil in a covered kettle two hours. This is a delicious dish and is useful in using up cold meats. - Mrs. W. A. Croffut, New York City.
A whole-cabbage dish built around leftover roast meat, with only one real problem: the two-hour boil belongs to an era of larger, tougher, field-stored cabbages.
- The hinge: keep it tiedThe cabbage must hold together or the filling escapes into the water. Wrap it in a double layer of cheesecloth and tie with kitchen twine in both directions, as the recipe's parenthesis suggests; the cloth also makes it possible to lift the thing out whole without collapsing it.
- Cutting the heartCut a cone down through the core from the stem end and hollow out the centre, leaving two or three layers of leaf as a shell. Blanching the whole head for five minutes first makes the outer leaves pliable enough to close over the opening without cracking.
- Two hours is too longA modern 2-3 lb green cabbage is tender in 45 minutes to an hour at a bare simmer, and past that it turns grey and sulphurous. Test with a skewer through the outer leaves rather than working to the clock.
- Simmer, do not boilA hard boil batters the head apart and drives the egg-bound filling loose. Keep the water at a lazy bubble, barely covering the cabbage, in a covered pot.
- The stuffingCooked chicken or veal chopped fine and bound with egg yolk sets firm but bland; "highly seasoned" is left undefined, and salt, black pepper, a little mace or nutmeg, grated onion and chopped parsley would all suit. A few soft breadcrumbs or a spoonful of the meat's gravy keeps it from drying out. Figure about 2 cups of chopped meat with 2 yolks.
- Balls or a massRolling the filling into balls, as written, lets you pack the cavity while leaving small gaps; it also means the dish carves into neat portions. Pressing it in as a single mass works but needs a longer cook to heat through.
- Cooking liquidWater gives a flat result. Salted chicken or veal stock does the dish considerably more good, and the cooking liquid can be reduced and thickened into a sauce.
- Yield and servingOne head serves four to six. Drain it well, cut off the cloth, and cut into wedges from the top like a cake, spooning sauce over. Buttered crumbs or a mustard sauce both suit it.
Stuffed whole cabbage of this kind runs through nineteenth-century American cookbooks under names like "cabbage pudding," and it belongs to a wide European family of dishes in which cabbage encloses forcemeat, from French chou farci to the boiled stuffed heads of Central and Eastern European kitchens. The recipe's closing line is the real reason it earned a page: this is a leftovers dish, and Mrs. Croffut's contribution sits in The Dixie Cook Book alongside other economies for the cold roast. Contributed recipes credited to individual women, with city and married name attached, were a standard form of the community compilation, and the presence of a New York City contributor in a cookbook marketed to Southern housekeepers is a reminder that these books borrowed freely from each other and from correspondents well outside their advertised region.