Home › The World's Kitchen › Spareribs with Cabbage
Spareribs with Cabbage
Procure six pieces salted spareribs. Plunge in plenty of cold water for thirty minutes. Remove the outer leaves of a medium-sized white cabbage cut into even quarters, suppress the stalks, and place in a saucepan with one gallon hot water. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Cover the pan and let slowly boil for forty-five minutes, then add the ribs, cover the pan again, and let slowly cook for forty-five minutes longer. Add six medium, sound, peeled raw potatoes and boil for forty minutes. Lift up the cabbage, arrange on a large dish, place the potatoes around the cabbage, then the ribs on top and serve.
A plain boiled dinner of cured pork and cabbage, written for a coal range where a pot could sit and mutter for two hours. The timings are the part that needs rethinking.
- Salted spareribsThese are pork ribs cured in brine, not fresh ones — the shelf equivalent today is a cured or corned pork rib, sold at some butchers and Eastern European or German shops. Fresh spareribs will work but the dish loses its point; if you use them, salt the pot properly. Thirty minutes in cold water is a light freshening for a mild cure; a heavily salted rib benefits from several hours or an overnight soak with a change of water.
- Hold back the seasoning saltThe teaspoon of salt assumes a mild cure and a gallon of water. With modern brined pork, add none at the start, taste the broth once the ribs have been in for twenty minutes, and salt then.
- "Suppress the stalks"Most likely this means cutting out the hard core from each quarter; it is worth leaving enough at the base to hold the leaves together, since a wedge that loses its core entirely will fall apart in the pot.
- The cabbage timing is the flawForty-five minutes alone, forty-five with the ribs, then forty more with the potatoes puts the cabbage in boiling water for well over two hours. It will be grey and collapsed. Reverse the order: simmer the soaked ribs for about an hour until tender, add the potatoes for twenty minutes, and drop the cabbage wedges in for the last fifteen to twenty.
- "Slowly boil"Read this as a bare simmer with the surface barely trembling. A hard boil shreds the cabbage and tightens the pork.
- A gallon of waterEnough to cover a whole cabbage and six ribs in a wide pot. Use a smaller volume in a snug pot and the resulting broth is worth keeping — it is essentially a light pork and cabbage stock, good with the leftovers the next day.
- Potatoes"Sound" means unblemished and unsprouted. A waxy potato holds its shape through the boil; a floury one will start to break up and cloud the pot, though it thickens the broth pleasantly if you don't mind that.
- YieldSix ribs, six potatoes, one cabbage — it serves six as written, and reheats better than most boiled dinners.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini had spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and his books shuttle between grand restaurant cookery and blunt domestic dishes like this one. Salted spareribs and cabbage is a preservation dish before it is a recipe: pork was butchered in cold weather, the ribs went into brine barrels with the rest, and they were fished out through the winter and freshened in cold water before cooking. Close relatives turn up all across northern Europe and its American descendants — the French petit salé aux choux, the German and Pennsylvania Dutch pork-and-kraut dinners, the Irish bacon and cabbage — all of them one pot, one fire, and cured meat lending its salt to whatever vegetable was in the cellar.