Cabbage
Boil a firm white cabbage for fifteen minutes in salted water; pour off the water and add fresh water; boil until tender; set aside until cold; chop finely. Butter a baking dish and fill with the chopped cabbage. Make a sauce with these ingredients: One tablespoonful of butter, one tablespoonful flour, one-half pint of water in which the cabbage was cooked, salt, pepper, four tablespoonfuls of grated cheese. Stir all the sauce ingredients except the cheese, over the fire until smooth. Season with salt and pepper, add the cheese. Pour the sauce over the cabbage and bake for seven minutes in a quick oven. Serve in the dish.
A plain cheese-sauced cabbage gratin, written for a cook who already knows how to make a white sauce. Two details in the original need translating: the oven heat and the pint.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. At seven minutes the dish is only being heated through, not cooked, so the oven has to be hot when it goes in.
- Half a pint of cooking waterOne cup. Most likely the second water, the one the cabbage finished in. The recipe does not say why the first boil is poured off, though period writers commonly recommended it to reduce the smell of the cabbage.
- The two boilsFifteen minutes, drain, fresh water, then cook until tender. It is the whole point of the method and the reason this tastes milder than most boiled cabbage. Skipping it gives you a sharper, more sulphurous dish.
- Why it is chilled before choppingThe recipe does not say. Cold cabbage does chop more cleanly than hot, and it will shed liquid as it sits, so drain it well again after chopping or the sauce may thin out in the dish.
- The sauceA tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of liquid is a thin white sauce. Cook the roux a minute before adding the liquid, and take the pan off the heat before the cheese goes in so it melts rather than breaks.
- The cheeseUnspecified, as is usual in books of this date; a firm aged Cheddar or a dry factory cheese is the likeliest intention. Four tablespoons is about an ounce — a light hand by modern gratin standards; double it if you want the dish to read as cheesy.
- Seven minutes will not brown itEverything is already cooked and the sauce is already hot, so the oven is doing very little. For a browned top, run it under the broiler for two or three minutes instead of watching the clock.
- YieldOne firm head of cabbage will roughly fill a shallow two-quart dish and should serve four to six as a side, though the recipe states neither. It is served in its baking dish, so use one you are willing to bring to the table.
Cabbage boiled twice, chopped and finished under a cheese sauce belongs to the domestic gratin tradition, and dishes of this kind appear in American household books of the 1890s and 1900s as one way to make an inexpensive winter vegetable acceptable at a proper table. Discarding the first water was frequent advice in such books, whose writers were much preoccupied with the smell of boiling cabbage and with the notion, part hygienic and part social, that strong-smelling vegetables were coarse. A white sauce built on a spoonful each of butter and flour was also a staple formula of the American cooking-school books of the period, which helps explain why a recipe like this can be written in a single paragraph and assume the reader needs no further explanation.