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Stuffed Cabbage
(Cavolo ripieno) Take a big cabbage, remove the hard outside leaves, cut the stem off even with the leaves and give it half cooking in salt water. Put it upside down to drain, then open the leaves one by one until the heart is exposed and on this put the stuffing. Bring up all the leaves, close them and tie with thread crosswise.
The stuffing can be made with milk veal stewed alone, or with sweetbread or chicken liver, all chopped fine. To make it more delicate, add some balsamella (No 54) a pinch of grated cheese, one yolk of egg and a taste of nutmeg.
Complete the cooking of the cabbage in the sauce of this stew, adding a little butter, on a low fire or in the oven kept low.
Instead of filling the whole cabbage, the larger leaves may be filled one by one, rolling and tying them. 113
A whole stuffed cabbage, parboiled and reassembled around a forcemeat, then braised slowly in the sauce of the stew that supplied the filling. The recipe assumes you already have leftover veal, sweetbread or liver stew on hand.
- The hinge: drain and cool before stuffingHalf-cooked cabbage that is still hot and wet will steam the filling and slump when tied. Invert it in a colander until it has stopped dripping and is cool enough to handle, then open the leaves outward one at a time without tearing them from the core.
- "Half cooking in salt water"The recipe gives no time, only 'half cooking'. Blanch a whole medium head in well-salted boiling water until the outer leaves are flexible and the heart is still firm; the cabbage finishes in the braise.
- Balsamella (No. 54)Béchamel: butter and flour cooked together, milk whisked in, simmered until thick. About half a cup of a stiff sauce is enough to bind the filling for one cabbage.
- "Milk veal"Milk-fed veal, meaning pale, mild meat. Ordinary veal shoulder works; the point is that the filling is a cooked stew, chopped fine, not raw ground meat.
- Sweetbread and chicken liverSweetbreads need soaking and blanching before they go into a stew, and are a special order at most butchers. Chicken livers are the easy substitute and give a stronger, more mineral filling; trim the green-tinged bits.
- Oven "kept low"A low oven, roughly 300-325F, covered, with the stew sauce and butter part-way up the cabbage. The recipe sets no time; expect something over an hour for a whole head and considerably less for individual rolls, and judge by tenderness.
- TyingKitchen twine, crosswise as described, then a second pass around the equator. Cut and remove all of it before serving; it is easiest to lift the cabbage with two spoons onto a warm dish.
- YieldOne large head serves four as a main course, six as a first course, cut into wedges through the stuffing. The individual rolls give roughly a dozen from one cabbage.
Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) drew heavily on Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina, and this entry has the Artusian habit of building one dish out of the remains of another: the veal or sweetbread stew is presumed already made, and the cabbage is finished in its sauce. Stuffed cabbage of this kind is found across northern and central Italy. The cross-referenced balsamella is the Italian form of béchamel, generally traced to French court cooking but long naturalised in Emilian kitchens, where it binds fillings and lasagne alike; here a spoonful of it, with cheese, yolk and nutmeg, is what the recipe offers to make the chopped forcemeat "more delicate."