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Cabbage Cooked in Cream
Chop sufficient cabbage to measure one pint. Put in a saucepan and cover well with water, cook until tender and drain; then return to saucepan with one cupful of cream; place at the side of fire, where it will cook slowly; season with white pepper and salt and two tablespoonfuls of butter; shake until evenly distributed; take from the fire and serve.
A plain braise that stands or falls on how long the cabbage boils before it meets the cream. The original assumes a coal range with a cooler edge; a low burner does the same job.
- Quantity"One pint" of chopped cabbage is a volume measure, something like 5 or 6 oz of shredded green or Savoy cabbage — a wedge off a medium head. It serves two or three as a side.
- Do not overboilThe hinge of the dish. Boiled "until tender" in the old sense could mean fifteen or twenty minutes, which turns cabbage grey and sulphurous. Five to seven minutes in well-salted water, until the thickest shreds bend without resistance, is enough.
- Drain hardCabbage holds a surprising amount of water and will thin the cream into a puddle. Press it in the colander, or spread it briefly on a towel, before it goes back in the pan.
- "Place at the side of fire"On a range, that meant the cooler edge of the stovetop. Use the lowest burner setting and let the cream reduce and cling, five to ten minutes, without letting it boil hard.
- The creamPeriod cream was generally richer than modern light cream, though its fat content varied with how it was separated. Heavy or whipping cream reduces properly; single cream or half-and-half is likelier to split over direct heat.
- White pepperChosen largely for looks: black flecks were thought untidy in a white sauce. Black pepper will do the job, though it tastes different — sharper and more aromatic — and it will show.
- Butter lastThe two tablespoons go in with the seasoning at the very end, off the boil, and are shaken through as the recipe directs; that gives gloss. Added early and boiled, butter separates out as oil.
Cabbage was cheap, stored through winter, and carried a reputation for coarseness and smell — much of it earned by the long boiling then standard. Cookbook writers of the 1890s and 1900s answered with cream, butter and short cooking, the same treatment being given to onions, celery and turnips in the vegetable chapters of the period. The Twentieth Century Cook Book, published around the turn of the century, is typical of the American compiled household manuals of its day, and its terse style — no timings, no yields, a stove described by where the heat is rather than how hot — assumes a cook who already knows what tender cabbage looks like.