No. 1773

Breast of Salt Pork with Cabbage

Poitrine de Porc sale aux Choux

Have a two-pound piece of the breast of bacon, unsalt it for two hours, scrape and parboil for ten minutes, then lay it in a saucepan full of boiling water to let cook very slowly for one hour; add to it two small and very clean curled cabbages cut in four and finish cooking the bacon and cabbages together; drain off and press the cabbages in a colander to extract all their water, then lay it on a long dish. Remove the rind from the bacon, cut it up into slices and dress them symmetrically over the cabbage, pouring a little clear gravy (No. 404) into the bottom of the dish.

← No. 1772 Black Blood Pudding Pork No. 1774 Chine of Pork a la Parmentier →

For the Modern Kitchen

A plain boiled dinner from Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), and one of the simplest things in the pork chapter. The whole dish turns on how salty your pork is to begin with.

What "breast of bacon" meansRanhofer is translating poitrine — the belly, cured but not smoked. The nearest modern equivalents are salt pork belly, unsmoked green bacon in a piece, or Italian pancetta tesa. Ordinary smoked slab bacon will work but pushes the flavour somewhere else entirely.
"Unsalt it for two hours"This is soaking in cold water to draw out brine. Nineteenth-century cured pork was far saltier than anything sold now; with modern commercial salt pork, one hour is usually enough, and with mild green bacon you may skip it. Taste the parboiling water to judge.
The parboil is not optionalTen minutes at a rolling boil, then discard that water. It removes the last of the surface salt and the scum, and it is the difference between a clean broth and a cloudy, aggressively salty one.
"Very slowly for one hour"A bare simmer, surface barely trembling, around 180-190F. A hard boil at this stage makes belly pork stringy and squeezes the fat out into the water rather than through the meat.
Curled cabbageSavoy. Two small heads quartered, cores left in so the wedges hold together. Ranhofer gives no time for the second stage, only "finish cooking the bacon and cabbages together"; expect the cabbage to end up fully soft rather than crisp-tender.
Pressing the cabbageThe step that saves the plate. Cabbage boiled in pork liquor holds an enormous amount of water; press it hard in a colander with the back of a ladle or it will flood the dish and dilute the gravy.
The clear gravyNo. 404 is Ranhofer's cross-reference for his clear gravy (jus). A few spoonfuls of good reduced veal or beef stock does the same job. Better not to use the cooking liquid — depending on how salty your pork was it may be too salty to pour over the finished dish, though it makes a good base for soup the next day.
YieldTwo pounds of belly with two small cabbages serves four generously as a main course. Slice the pork about a quarter-inch thick, against the grain.

A Little History

Boiled salt pork with cabbage is peasant cooking that Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's, included because The Epicurean was meant as a complete reference to French cookery, not only its luxuries — the pork section runs to blood pudding and to this. Petit salé aux choux and its relatives appear across northern France and, in richer form, as the Alsatian choucroute and the potée of the Auvergne; the logic is the same everywhere, a preserved cut of pig simmered with the vegetable that keeps through winter in a cellar. The pork supplies the salt and fat the cabbage lacks, and the cabbage takes on the cooking liquor. In an American kitchen of the 1890s salt pork was a staple barrel item in a way it no longer is, and Ranhofer assumes his reader must soak the salt out rather than add any.