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Baked Cabbage
Boil a cabbage, then put in a colander, and drain it until perfectly dry; then chop fine; put in pepper, salt, and a little cream, and put in an earthen baking-pan and into the oven, Bake one hour.
A short nineteenth-century recipe that assumes you know the parts it leaves out: how long to boil, how much cream, and how hot the oven. Here is what the gaps mean in practice.
- The hinge: drain it dryThe instruction to drain "until perfectly dry" is the whole recipe. Cabbage holds an enormous amount of water, and if it goes into the dish wet the cream thins to a grey pool. Press the chopped cabbage in the colander with the back of a spoon, or wring it in a towel.
- Boiling timeQuarter a medium head and boil in well-salted water 8 to 12 minutes, until a knife passes through the core with no resistance. Nineteenth-century recipes that do specify tend to boil cabbage a good deal longer, but there is no need to take it to collapse, since an hour in the oven follows.
- "A little cream"Read this as roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup of heavy cream for a medium head, enough to coat rather than to submerge. Cream was not standardised for fat content in this period, and the amount here is left to the cook's judgement.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; domestic ovens of the period had no thermostatic control. Treat it as a moderate oven, about 350F. A little butter dotted on top, or a handful of crumbs, will give a browned surface, though the recipe calls for neither.
- The hourAn hour at 350F is a long time for already-boiled cabbage; expect it to be very soft and sweet, which is the point of the dish. If you want it set rather than melting, 30 to 35 minutes is enough.
- "Earthen baking-pan"Glazed earthenware, i.e. any shallow ceramic or glass baking dish. Bare cast iron or aluminium can react with sulphurous vegetables and may leave a metallic taste.
- YieldOne medium head serves four as a side dish. Season the chopped cabbage more assertively than seems necessary before it goes in the oven, since cream mutes both salt and pepper.
Baked or scalloped cabbage of this kind belongs to a broad family of North American and British dishes that rescued a cheap, plentiful winter vegetable by boiling it, draining it hard and finishing it with dairy in the oven. Recipes of the period are often full of such brief entries: they were written by cooks for cooks who already knew the basics, which is why the oven heat and the boiling time are simply omitted. Cabbage was the keeping vegetable of the period, stored in cellars, root pits and barrels through the winter, and much of the recipe's logic is about disguising the sulphurous edge that long storage and long boiling produce. Cream and the oven do that work, as does the fine chopping, which is what separates this from a plain boiled cabbage sent to the table in wedges.