Home › Vegetables › Stuffed Cabbage
Stuffed Cabbage
1 onion cup bread crumbs cup milk 1-21-2 1 egg Seasoning 1 green pepper Select solid cabbage, not too large, remove outside leaves, cut out stalk end, leaving a hollow shell. Chop uncooked beef, with bacon and onion. Add crumbs soaked in milk, beaten egg, salt and pepper. Shape mixture into balls or cakes, arrange in cabbage. Arrange strips of sweet pepper on top of cabbage, tie in cheese-cloth, then steam or boil until tender. Serve with tomato sauce. 1½ cups ground raw carrots 1 cup boiled rice 1 cup ground peanuts
The ingredient list has come through the scanner badly damaged, and the last line belongs to something else entirely. What survives is a clear method: a hollowed cabbage packed with raw meatballs, wrapped and boiled, served with tomato sauce.
- The broken measurements"cup bread crumbs cup milk 1-21-2" is most likely ½ cup bread crumbs and ½ cup milk. No quantity of beef or bacon is given anywhere; about 1 lb ground beef with 2-3 oz chopped bacon suits a cabbage of the size described.
- The stray last line"1½ cups ground raw carrots, 1 cup boiled rice, 1 cup ground peanuts" appears to belong to a neighbouring entry rather than to this recipe. Ignore it unless you want a meatless version, in which case it can stand in for the beef and bacon.
- Hollowing the cabbageThe hinge of the dish. Cut out the core and enough of the dense heart to leave a shell three or four leaves thick; if the walls are too thin the head collapses when the meat swells. Blanching the whole head for five minutes first makes the leaves pliable and far less likely to split.
- Cheese-clothNot decorative. Two layers of cheesecloth or a clean muslin square, tied at the top like a bundle, is what holds the head together through an hour of boiling. Butcher's twine round the outside does the same job.
- Steam or boil until tenderReckon on 1 to 1¼ hours for a 2 lb head, whether steamed over water or simmered in salted water or stock. The meat balls must reach 160F, so err long rather than short; cabbage is forgiving.
- Green pepper, sweet pepperThe same thing as used in this recipe: an ordinary bell pepper, cut in strips and laid over the head before wrapping. It colours and perfumes the outer leaves rather than seasoning the filling.
- SeasoningShorthand for salt and pepper, which the method then spells out. A teaspoon of salt to the pound of meat is about right.
- Yield and servingOne head serves four to six. Bring it whole to the table, unwrap, and cut in wedges through cabbage and meat together, with the tomato sauce poured over.
Stuffed cabbage in some form runs through most of central and eastern Europe, and it appears in American community and corporate cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century. What is unusual here is the whole-head treatment: the more familiar immigrant version rolls individual leaves around meat and rice, while this one keeps the cabbage intact as a container, ties it in cloth and boils it like a pudding, a method also long documented in French cookery, though nothing on the page indicates a lineage. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company distributed cook books of this kind free to policyholders as part of a broader public-health effort, which may have something to do with the tone of the whole section: cheap vegetables, stretched meat, a panade of bread and milk to make a pound go further, and the meatless carrot-rice-peanut filling that has wandered into the bottom of this page from whatever entry sat beside it.