No. 2707

Red Cabbage a la Montargis

Choux Rouges a la Montargis

Divide two red cabbages in four pieces, remove the core and the hard stalks from the leaves; mince finely, wash and drain. Place in a saucepan half a pound of butter, and half a pound of bacon cut in quarter-inch squares; first blanch them, then let fry in the butter, and add the cabbage, salt, pepper and nutmeg; moisten with a pint of broth (No. 194a) and a gill of brandy. Have six sour apples, peel, round and core them with a tin tube five-eights of an inch in diameter; lay them in with the cabbage, and cover the top with a buttered paper; cook in a slow oven for two hours and a half. Just when ready to serve remove the fat and dress the cabbage in the center of a dish with the apples around, arranging a small Chipolata sausage (No. 754) between each one.

← No. 2706 Cabbage, Peasant Style Cabbages & Greens No. 2708 Kohl-Rabies, Housekeeper's Style →

For the Modern Kitchen

A long, slow braise of red cabbage with bacon, brandy and whole apples, from Charles Ranhofer's Delmonico repertoire. Almost nothing here needs changing except the vocabulary and the oven dial.

Slow ovenUsually read as somewhere around 300F; two and a half hours at that temperature should give a soft, glossy braise. Check the liquid if you run the oven hotter.
A gill of brandyA gill is half a cup, or 4 fl oz. With a pint of broth that gives about 2 1/2 cups of liquid for two cabbages; the cabbage also releases a great deal of its own moisture.
Quantity of cabbageTwo red cabbages of the size sold now come to about 4 to 5 lb trimmed, which will fill a large Dutch oven and serve eight to ten as a side dish. Halve the recipe for a household batch.
Butter and baconHalf a pound of each is period-appropriate richness for a dish meant to be skimmed before serving, as the recipe instructs. Modern bacon is already wet-cured and salty; the blanching the recipe calls for (two or three minutes is enough) pulls out excess salt and smoke and keeps the butter from browning too fast.
Keeping the colourRed cabbage turns blue-grey in alkaline conditions and stays red in acid. The apples supply some of that acid, but a tablespoon of cider vinegar added with the broth is the usual insurance if your water is hard.
Round and core them"Round" means paring the peeled apples into neat barrel shapes so they present uniformly on the dish; the tin tube is an apple corer. Choose a firm apple that holds its shape, such as Granny Smith, since a soft eating apple will collapse over two and a half hours.
Buttered paperA round of buttered parchment laid directly on the surface, not a sealed lid. It traps enough steam to keep the top from drying while still letting the braise reduce. A tight lid gives you a wetter, blander result.
ChipolataRanhofer's No. 754 is a small, coarse, lightly spiced fresh pork sausage. Any modern chipolata or thin breakfast sausage works; brown them separately and arrange them at the last moment so they do not lose their colour in the braise.

A Little History

Montargis, a town in the Loiret south of Paris, lends its name to several nineteenth-century garnishes and dishes, and this cabbage carries the label. The combination itself is older and broader than any French garnish name. Red cabbage with pork fat, apples and a sour element is the standard treatment across Alsace, the Low Countries and the German states, where the acid both seasons the dish and fixes its colour. Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years and published The Epicurean in 1894, was cooking for a city with a very large German and Alsatian population, and his cabbage chapter reflects that: peasant-style cabbage, kohlrabi "housekeeper's style", and this one dressed up with brandy, turned apples and a ring of sausages so it could go out to a Delmonico table.