Cabbage Soup
(Sicily.) Trim and slice a nice head of cabbage, parboil it, and drain it and chop it finely. Fry it in an ounce of butter; add a tablespoonful of flour, salt, pepper, and 1 quart of veal broth. Simmer 1 hour, press it through a sieve, add 1 pint of hot milk, season it, and serve with croutons.
A plain purée soup of the sort that turns up all over turn-of-the-century cookbooks under a foreign name. The method is sound; only the proportions and the sieve need translating.
- The hinge: parboil, then drain hardCabbage boiled straight into the broth gives the soup a sulphurous edge. The initial parboil and thorough draining is what keeps the finished purée sweet, so do not skip it or reuse that water.
- QuantitiesA "nice head" of green or Savoy cabbage means roughly 1.5-2 lb trimmed. With a quart of broth and a pint of milk this serves six as a first course.
- An ounce of butter is 2 tablespoonsIt is barely enough to carry a tablespoon of flour, which makes a very loose roux. Doubling both the butter and the flour gives a soup that holds together after sieving.
- Veal brothRarely sold now. A light chicken stock is the closest match; avoid dark beef stock, which will swamp the cabbage. Unsalted stock is preferable since the recipe seasons twice.
- Simmering an hourLonger than modern practice would allow for already-parboiled cabbage. Thirty to forty minutes is enough to soften it for puréeing; beyond that you lose colour and gain a stronger cabbage smell.
- Press it through a sieveA blender or stick blender does this in seconds. A pass through a fine sieve afterwards is still worth it if you want the velvety texture the original assumes.
- Adding the milkHeat it separately, as directed, and stir it in off a hard boil. A flour-thickened soup with milk added will catch on the bottom of the pan if it is left to boil hard afterwards.
- CroutonsCubes of stale white bread fried in butter, not baked. Fried croutons are a common finish for sieved soups in cookbooks of this period, and they are the only textural contrast the dish has.
This comes from Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902), one of a run of American books that collected "quaint dishes from foreign lands" for home cooks who were unlikely ever to visit them. The Sicilian label sits loosely on the recipe: butter, flour, veal broth and milk describe a French velouté-style purée far more than anything from a Sicilian kitchen, where olive oil rather than butter is the usual cooking fat and dairy tends to appear as cheese, and where cabbage more often appears braised or in pasta. Cookbooks of this era routinely attached a country to a dish on slender grounds, and the attribution tells you more about how Americans imagined Mediterranean cooking in 1902 than about Sicily. What is genuine is the technique: sieved vegetable soups thickened with a roux and let down with milk are a staple of the period's soup chapters, cheap enough for everyday and refined enough to open a dinner.