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Colcannon
3 tablespoonfuls Crisco ½ lb. cold cooked cabbage ½ lb. cold cooked potatoes 1 onion Salt and pepper to taste Chop onion and cabbage and mash potatoes. Put into frying pan with Crisco and fry few minutes adding seasonings. Turn into Criscoed fireproof dish and brown in oven.
A leftovers dish, and the proportions are forgiving. The only real technique is getting the pan hot enough to build a crust rather than steam the vegetables.
- CriscoAny solid or liquid fat works: butter, bacon drippings, or neutral oil. Three tablespoons for three pounds of vegetables is lean by modern taste; butter is the fat most often associated with colcannon, though bacon fat and drippings were also used.
- "Criscoed" dishSimply means greased. Use a shallow ovenproof dish or a cast-iron skillet you can move straight from stovetop to oven.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. Brown at 425F for 20-25 minutes, or run it under the broiler for 5 minutes if the mixture is already hot through.
- Cold cooked vegetablesThe recipe depends on this. Freshly boiled potatoes are too wet and will slump; cold, dry mash holds together and takes a crust.
- The raw onionChopped onion goes in raw and gets only a few minutes in the pan. Soften it in the fat first for a couple of minutes before the cabbage and potato go in, or it stays sharp.
- Getting the crustPress the mixture flat and leave it alone. Turning it constantly, as "fry few minutes" might suggest, prevents the browned bottom that is the point of the dish.
- CabbageGreen or Savoy cabbage, or kale, all suit. Squeeze out excess water before chopping.
- YieldThree pounds of vegetables serves six to eight as a side, four as a supper dish with an egg on top.
Colcannon is an Irish dish whose name is generally traced to the Gaelic cál ceannann, roughly "white-headed cabbage," and it belongs to the long tradition of stretching potatoes with whatever green was in the garden — cabbage, kale, sometimes leek tops. It was closely tied to Hallowe'en, when charms such as a ring or a coin were hidden in the bowl for the unmarried to find. Its appearance in a Crisco promotional cookbook is a small piece of commercial strategy rather than culinary history: Procter & Gamble launched Crisco in 1911 and needed to show the new hydrogenated shortening doing every job that butter, lard and drippings did, including frying up yesterday's vegetables. Substituting Crisco for the butter or bacon fat traditionally used here was exactly the sort of swap the book existed to suggest.