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April 29
Menu: Vegetarian; Cream of Salsify Soup; Nut Sausage, Brown Sauce; Grilled Sweet Potatoes; Sour German Cabbage; Apple and Prune Tart; Coffee Sour German Cabbage-2 quarts chopped cabbage, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1½ cup vinegar, salt and pepper to taste. Soak cabbage in cold water for 1 hour; drain; place it in an uncovered kettle of boiling salted water, cook 20 minutes; drain and return to kettle. Add vinegar, bring cabbage to boiling-point and cook 5 minutes. Add Crisco, salt and pepper to taste.
A plain sweet-sour cabbage from the daily menu calendar, written to show Crisco standing in for the bacon fat or butter a German cook would have used. Two things need attention: the vinegar quantity as printed, and the cooking time.
- The vinegar is the ambiguityThe original reads "1½ cup vinegar," which is almost certainly 1½ cups of the period's household vinegar. That is a great deal of undiluted acid for 2 quarts of cabbage by modern taste; start with about half and add more at the end, tasting as you go. Distilled white or cider vinegar today runs 5 percent acidity; period vinegars were broadly in that range, though strength was not standardised.
- CriscoCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a solid white shortening sold as a substitute for lard and butter. Current Crisco is a different fat blend; 2 tablespoons of butter, bacon fat or a neutral oil will do the same work of rounding the acid.
- Volume of cabbageTwo quarts chopped is roughly one medium head, about 2 lb trimmed. Expect four to six side servings.
- Total cooking timeTwenty minutes in boiling water plus five more in vinegar will reduce cabbage to a soft, strongly sulfurous mass. Eight to ten minutes in the water is plenty for shredded cabbage, then two or three minutes in the vinegar.
- Why the kettle stays uncoveredCovering cabbage traps the sulfur compounds released as it cooks and drives the smell and flavour back into the vegetable. The instruction is sound and worth keeping.
- Add the acid last, and know what it doesVinegar firms cabbage and slows further softening, which may be why it comes after the boil rather than before; the recipe gives no reason. If you cook the cabbage in vinegar from the start it will stay stubbornly firm.
- The hour-long soakCold-water soaking was a standard step when cabbage came from the garden or a market barrel and might carry insects or grit. With a supermarket head, a rinse of the separated leaves is sufficient.
- Stray text at the end"April 30 — Pepper Pot, Mutton Cutlets, Tomato Sauce" is not part of the recipe. It is the heading of the next day's menu in the book's dinner calendar, caught by the page break.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's cookbook for a product introduced in 1911: cottonseed oil hardened by hydrogenation into a white, shelf-stable solid meant to replace lard and butter. The book's 600-odd recipes exist to demonstrate that the new fat could do everything the old ones did, and the "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a year of menus so a housekeeper never had to wonder where Crisco fit. Sour cabbage is worth noting alongside a selling point P&G pressed directly, advertising the shortening as suitable for kosher kitchens and securing rabbinical endorsement for it. The sweet-sour treatment of cabbage itself belongs to a broad German and Central European tradition, the same family as Rotkohl and the vinegar-dressed cabbage salads that reached American tables with nineteenth-century immigration.