Home › A Calendar of Dinners › January 23
January 23
Menu: Beet Salad; Barley Soup; Corned Beef; Ladies' Cabbage Fried Celery; Cheese; Crackers; Arrowroot Pudding with Stewed Fruit; Coffee Ladies'Cabbage-Cutsmall, hard head cabbage into halves; remove core and harder portions, chop remaining part quite fine. Throw this into kettle of boiling salted water, boil uncovered for 30 minutes; drain in colander. Put cabbage back in saucepan, add 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1 tablespoon flour; dust flour over cabbage; stir carefully with wooden spoon, and add ½ pint of milk, 1/2 teaspoon of salt and 1 saltspoon of white pepper. Stand this on back part of stove to simmer 10 minutes; send to table.
A plain creamed cabbage under a genteel name, from the daily menu calendar in Procter & Gamble's Crisco booklet. The method is sound; the timing belongs to another era.
- The half-hour boilThirty minutes in open water reduces chopped cabbage to grey pulp and drives off the sulphur compounds along with the flavour and most of the texture. Eight to ten minutes in plenty of boiling salted water gets it tender with something left to chew; drain very well, since waterlogged cabbage will thin the sauce.
- Uncovered, and whyThe one instruction worth keeping literally. Leaving the pot open lets volatile sulphur compounds escape rather than condensing back into the water, which is what makes overcooked cabbage smell the way it does.
- Old measuresHalf a pint of milk is one cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two tablespoons of Crisco and one of flour make a slightly fat-heavy roux, which keeps the sauce from tightening.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works; butter gives a better creamed cabbage than shortening does, and nothing in the method depends on Crisco specifically.
- Dusting the flourFlour is scattered over hot drained cabbage in the fat rather than cooked into a proper roux first. Give it a minute of stirring before the milk goes in or the sauce will taste raw and pasty.
- "Back part of the stove"On a coal range that was the cool zone. Use the lowest burner setting and stir now and then; ten minutes at a bare simmer is right, and the sauce will thicken as it goes.
- White pepperCalled for so no dark specks show in the white sauce, a common nicety of the period. Black pepper will serve, at the cost of the appearance and a somewhat different flavour.
- YieldThe recipe calls for one small hard head with a cup of milk; enough for about four as a side dish.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it; the "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a full menu to every day of the year so that the tin would be reached for daily. "Ladies' cabbage" is an older American name, appearing in nineteenth-century household books well before Crisco existed, and generally understood to mean cabbage boiled, chopped and bound in a mild cream sauce until it was thought delicate enough for a lady's plate as against boiled cabbage served with pork.