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Tip-Top Pudding, or Vegetable Pudding
Boil a firm, white cabbage fifteen minutes, changing water then for more from the boiling tea-kettle; when tender, drain and set aside till perfectly cold; chop fine, add two beaten eggs, a tablespoon of butter, three of very rich milk or cream, pepper and salt. Stir all well together, and bake in a buttered pudding-dish until brown; serve hot. This dish is digestible and palatable, much resembling cauliflowers. -- "Aunt Dinah."
A cabbage gratin in all but name, from an era when "pudding" meant anything baked in a deep dish. The recipe assumes you know your own oven, so the numbers below fill the gaps.
- The water change is the pointBoiling fifteen minutes, dumping that water, and finishing in fresh boiling water from the kettle drives off the sulphurous compounds that make long-cooked cabbage smell strong. Use water already at a boil for the second round so the cabbage does not sit and stew.
- Drain hardCabbage holds an enormous amount of water, and any that remains will thin the egg custard and leave a puddle in the dish. After draining, press the cooled cabbage in a colander or twist it in a towel before chopping.
- Cool it completely"Set aside till perfectly cold" is not fussiness. Hot cabbage will scramble the beaten eggs on contact rather than setting into a custard around them.
- QuantitiesA firm white cabbage of about 2 lb gives several cups once boiled, drained and chopped fine, which two eggs and three tablespoons of cream will only just bind. A larger head may want a third egg.
- Pudding-dishPeriod pudding-dishes were commonly deep earthenware, but any baking dish of about 1 to 1.5 quarts will serve; a shallower one gives more of the browned surface the recipe asks for.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for 35 to 45 minutes sets the custard and browns the surface; the centre should be firm to a light press.
- Very rich milkIn a nineteenth-century kitchen this meant unhomogenised milk with the cream still on it. Heavy cream or half-and-half is the closest modern equivalent.
- YieldFour as a side dish. It reheats poorly once the custard has set and wept, so bake it to be eaten.
Baked cabbage puddings of this kind are often said to appear throughout Anglo-American cookery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where "pudding" described the vessel and the method rather than anything sweet: a mixture bound with eggs and baked or boiled in a deep dish. The claim that it "much resembles cauliflowers" is a common selling point in period books, cauliflower being the more expensive and more genteel of the two brassicas, and boiling cabbage in two changes of water does genuinely mute the sulphurous edge that separates them. The attribution to "Aunt Dinah" tells us little: such names circulated in the period as pen-names used by contributors of any background, and whether a specific person stood behind this contribution cannot be established from the book.