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Stuffed Cabbage
Detach twelve sound leaves from a good-sized cabbage, plunge in two quarts boiling water with teaspoon salt, boil for fifteen minutes and drain on sieve. Lay on a board and trim each leaf into three-inch squares, spreading trimmings over main leaves, then sprinkle teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper evenly over them.
Place in a bowl eight skinned sausages with a half teaspoon chopped parsley, two tablespoons bread crumbs, three saltspoons salt, two saltspoons pepper, half saltspoon nutmeg and one egg yolk. Mix well, evenly divide this force in centre of leaves and fold up. Have a cloth in palm of left hand, place a cabbage on it, close up hand, then briskly twist cloth and press left hand with right so as to give a firm, round shape. Place on lightly buttered sautoire, pour in two gills broth, lightly baste surface with a little melted butter, cover with a buttered paper, set in oven for thirty minutes, remove and serve as directed.
A straightforward sausage-stuffed cabbage roll, written in professional kitchen shorthand. The measurements and the vessel names need translating, and the blanching time should be cut sharply.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the filling takes about 3/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper and a scant 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg.
- GillA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of broth in the pan — enough to keep the rolls moist and give you a little pan liquid to spoon over.
- SautoireA sautoire is a straight-sided shallow sauté pan. Any ovenproof skillet or shallow baking dish that holds the twelve rolls snugly in one layer will do.
- Blanching timeFifteen minutes in boiling water leaves the leaves grey and slack. Two to four minutes is enough to make them pliable; refresh in cold water and pat dry so the trimmings and filling stay put.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F for the stated thirty minutes, checking that the sausage filling has reached 160F at the centre of a roll.
- The sausagesEight skinned sausages is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb of bulk sausage meat. Plain pork sausage suits the parsley-and-nutmeg seasoning; a heavily seasoned Italian or breakfast sausage will fight it.
- Buttered paperA round of buttered parchment laid directly on the rolls, not a sealed lid — it keeps the tops from drying while letting some liquid reduce. Foil works but traps more steam.
- The twisting stepSqueezing each parcel in a twisted cloth compacts the filling and expels some water; the recipe's own stated aim is 'a firm, round shape', which is what helps the rolls hold together in the pan.
- YieldTwelve rolls, so four to six servings. "Serve as directed" refers the reader elsewhere in the book; the pan broth spooned over, or a tomato or brown sauce, would suit, though the recipe itself names none.
Stuffed cabbage belongs to no single country: versions run from Polish go y bki and Ukrainian holubtsi to Hungarian t lt t k poszta, Jewish sweet-and-sour holishkes, Romanian sarmale and the Turkish and Balkan lahana sarma, many of them often traced to the older Ottoman and Middle Eastern habit of wrapping seasoned meat in vine leaves. What marks this particular version is its handling: the nutmeg, the egg yolk binder, the buttered paper and the sautoire are the vocabulary of a professional, French-influenced kitchen rather than a domestic one. Building the filling from bought sausages rather than raw minced pork is a shortcut available to any cook who could buy seasoned sausage by the link.