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Scalloped Cabbage
head cabbage teaspoon pepper 1½ cups white sauce (see page 29) cup bread crumbs 1 teaspoon salt Soak and wash half a head of firm cabbage in salted water. Then boil cabbage. Allow to cook and cut fine. Into a well-greased baking-dish put a layer of well-seasoned cabbage (salt, pepper), a layer of white sauce, and continue making layers until all of the ingredients are used. Put well-buttered bread crumbs over top of the mixture. Bake (covered) until the mixture is bubbling hot. Then remove, cover and brown. 1 pound beef 1 medium-sized cabbage 1 slice bacon or salt pork
A layered gratin of boiled cabbage and white sauce, of the sort that appears in most early twentieth-century American vegetable chapters. The original gives no oven setting, so a few decisions have to be made for it.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. A moderate oven, 350-375F, is right for a dish whose contents are already cooked; the covered stage only needs to bring everything up to a bubble, and the uncovered stage browns the crumbs.
- Don't overboil the cabbageHalf a firm head, quartered and cored, needs only a short boil, roughly 8-12 minutes in salted water once it is boiling. Longer and it turns grey and sulphurous, and it will soften further in the oven. Drain it very thoroughly or the sauce will thin out into the dish.
- "Allow to cook and cut fine"Read as cool, then cut fine. Cabbage handled hot shreds into mush; let it drain and cool until you can chop it into coarse ribbons that hold their shape between the layers.
- The white sauceThe book's own sauce on page 29 isn't reproduced here, so its thickness has to be guessed at; a medium sauce for 1½ cups milk would run to about 3 tablespoons butter and 3 tablespoons flour, seasoned. It should coat a spoon rather than pour freely, since the cabbage will release a little more liquid as it bakes.
- Buttered crumbsToss the cup of fresh bread crumbs with 2-3 tablespoons melted butter until each crumb is coated. Dry crumbs scattered on top will scorch in places and stay pale in others.
- Covered, then uncoveredThe published line reads "remove, cover and brown" -- meaning remove the cover and brown. Figure 20-25 minutes covered, then 8-10 minutes uncovered until the top is golden.
- YieldHalf a head of cabbage with this quantity of sauce fills a 1½-quart dish and serves four as a side.
Scalloped vegetables were the workhorse of the American cookery-school tradition that shaped books like this one: a boiled vegetable, a measured white sauce, buttered crumbs, and a moderate oven, applied in turn to cabbage, celery, onions, potatoes and salsify. The formula owes its dominance to the Boston Cooking School method of teaching a handful of standard sauces by proportion and then combining them with whatever was in season, which is why the recipe here simply refers the reader to a numbered page for the sauce. Cabbage in particular benefited from the treatment; a cream sauce and a browned crust were the usual way of making a cheap, plentiful winter vegetable acceptable at a company table, and of masking the smell that long boiling produced.