Home › The World's Kitchen › Stuffed Cabbage, Russian Style
Stuffed Cabbage, Russian Style
Trim stale leaves and cut off stalk of a medium cabbage, boil in plenty of water with teaspoon salt for forty-five minutes, remove and place on a sieve to drain for fifteen minutes.
Boil two ounces raw rice in water for ten minutes, drain, then place in a bowl. Remove skin from six country sausages, and add meat to rice with a half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, saltspoon grated nutmeg, teaspoon chopped parsley, and thoroughly mix with wooden spoon. Carefully pull back leaves from stalk without detaching them, then spread a little force over each leaf, close them up to former position, then wrap cabbage in a cheesecloth, but not too tight. Place it in saucepan with any trimmings of veal, beef or pork at hand, a sliced carrot, sliced onion, two branches parsley, and cover with cold water. Season with a tablespoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, cover pan and let gently cook for an hour and forty-five minutes. Take up cabbage, drain, unwrap, dress on a hot dish and send to table with two gills hot tomato sauce separately.
A whole cabbage stuffed leaf by leaf rather than rolled — the layered construction is the point, and it depends entirely on keeping the head intact. Everything else is straightforward simmering.
- Keep the head wholeThe hinge of the dish is cutting out the stalk without cutting the leaves free, so they peel back like petals and fold home again. Core it with a paring knife from the base, angling inward, and blanch only until the outer leaves bend without cracking.
- That 45-minute boilThree-quarters of an hour of boiling would suit an old, dense winter cabbage, though the recipe gives no reason. Modern cabbage is younger and looser, and 10 to 15 minutes in salted water is generally enough; longer tends to leave the finished dish watery and grey.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of pepper is a scant teaspoon and a saltspoon of nutmeg is a pinch or two. A gill is half a cup, making two gills of tomato sauce one cup.
- "Force"Short for forcemeat — the rice and sausage mixture. Two ounces of raw rice is about a third of a cup, and parboiling it ten minutes leaves it deliberately underdone so it finishes inside the cabbage.
- Country sausageCoarse fresh pork sausage, unsmoked and uncured, sold in links to be skinned. Bulk breakfast sausage works; six links is roughly three-quarters of a pound. Avoid anything cured or heavily sweetened.
- WrappingCheesecloth loose enough that the leaves can swell, tied at the top like a pudding, is what holds the head together in the pot. A double layer of muslin and kitchen twine does the same job, and a plate set on top keeps it submerged.
- The trimmingsVeal, beef or pork scraps with carrot, onion and parsley make an improvised stock the cabbage poaches in. Bones from the butcher, or a quart of unsalted stock cut with water, give the same result. The tablespoon of salt is for a full pot of liquid, not for the cabbage alone.
- Doneness and yieldAn hour and three-quarters at a bare simmer suits a head of this size; the pork filling should reach 160F at the centre, the USDA figure for ground pork. Cut in wedges through the layers, it serves four to six.
Stuffed whole cabbage belongs to a broad Central and Eastern European family that also includes the rolled versions — Polish gołąbki, Ukrainian holubtsi, Romanian sarmale — in which cheap grain and a small quantity of pork are stretched by the leaf that wraps them. In the whole-head method the cabbage is opened out, layered with forcemeat and reassembled, so that it arrives at table looking like an untouched cabbage and is carved in wedges. Filippini's book sorts dishes by national label for an American audience, and "Russian style" here signals the Slavic pork-rice-and-cabbage idiom generally rather than any single documented regional recipe. The cheesecloth wrapping and the pot of veal or beef trimmings are kitchen habits of the period, when stock was often made from whatever bones were at hand.