Alsatian cabbage - a favourite recipe

"Cabbage as a food has problems. It is easy to grow, a useful source of greenery for much of the year. Yet as a vegetable it has original sin, and needs improvement. It can smell foul in the pot, linger through the house with pertinacity, and ruin a meal with its wet flesh. Cabbage also has a nasty history of being good for you. Read Pliny, if you do not believe me." Jane Grigson

I'm doing a bit of precooking for tomorrow's lunch and one of the things I have prepared is some cabbage to serve with my pork in milk. (I am getting increasingly nervous about the pork I have to say. Have I got enough? How am I going to stop the milk burning? How do I make it look good? ... - but that's another matter.) The cabbage I am serving, however is tried and true. It might not look sensational either - it looks somewhat like the picture above - just a brownie beige tangle. Though I could brighten it up with a bit of parsley I guess.

I first made this particular recipe way back in my early married years. It is from Penguin Cordon Bleu Cookery - a rather beaten up and faded at the edges paperback that I use very rarely these days. In its time however I used it a lot.

Anyway I must have been cooking a meal for friends way back then and chose Loin of Pork Alsacienne, which was accompanied by cabbage. Interestingly I thought that my cabbage recipe was just that - a cabbage recipe, and indeed there is a recipe called Cabbage Alsacienne, in the book but it's not at all what I cook. Fortunately within that recipe was a reference to the pork recipe and indeed this is where the cabbage comes from.

The interesting thing is how this recipe has evolved in my kitchen over time. I don't make it very often but it is a Christmas dinner staple. It seems that in England braised red cabbage seems to be the thing. Here is the original recipe. You cannot find it online of course.

1 small drum-head cabbage or 1 tin sauerkraut, or 1lb if bought loose

1 oz butter

1 onion

4 dessert apples

1 lemon

2 hard-boiled eggs

Chopped parsley

Shred the cabbage finely and blanch; drain well. Melt the butter in a stew pan, add the onion, cover and cook for a few minutes; draw aside. Peel and quarter the apples, cut away the peel and pith from the lemon, and cut the flesh into segments. Arrange the apple quarters rounded side downwards on the bottom of the pan with the onions. Put the cabbage on top with the lemon and plenty of salt and pepper. Cover with a thickly buttered paper and the lid and cook gently until tender - about 45-50 minutes.

Turn out on to a hot dish, scatter the top thickly with chopped parsley and garnish with quarters of hard-boiled eggs.

I'm sure when I made it originally I would have followed the instructions to the letter. Well one usually does with a new recipe, although these days I am often tempted to meddle - which is a bit stupid. I'm guessing the hard-boiled eggs got dropped first. David doesn't like them and they are a bit incongruous are they not? Rather 60s I think.

Somewhere along the line I stopped cutting the lemon into segments and now I simply add lemon juice, and the apples too, rather than being arranged on the bottom in quarters, are sliced thinly and cooked with the onions first, before mixing with the cabbage, which is generally not pre-blanched. I generally only blanch it if I have so much that it won't fit in my pan. And I only use one or two apples, not four. Tart Granny Smith's as well - not dessert apples.

I suspect some of these changes were sort of thought out, and some just happened because I couldn't be bothered to look up the recipe and misremembered. Maybe deep down I changed it to how I thought it should be anyway.

Anyway I do recommend this. It will not keep its fresh green colour. You do need to cook it for as long as it says, to let it soften completely and absorb the flavours of the apples and the lemon. But honestly, it really does taste good. My boys like it too.

"The best cooked cabbage in the world will flop and loose its charm if it's left to hang about in the oven. ... Wateriness is the great sin against cabbage. Butter and a good grinding of black pepper at the last moment, just before serving is what saves it." Jane Grigson

There are lots of variations out there of course - adding bacon or ham or sausage, adding seeds such as caraway, adding wine, cider, beer. it's one of those recipes that is a method really rather than a prescriptive recipe. In fact none of my 'classic' French recipe books have this recipe at all. I don't think I saw a single recipe for a braised cabbage - other than Choucroute Garnie of course - and that is sauerkraut anyway, which is slightly different.

I fear my whole meal tomorrow is going to look a bit beige. I have also gone for apples for dessert - baked in the oven with orange juice and Grand Marnier. They are done and will taste good I'm sure, but they do look very anaemic. Now you can't scatter parsley on apples, so I'm going to have to look for inspiration through the photogenic sites - Donna Hay first. Crumbled biscuits of some kind perhaps, though I don't want to end up with apple crumble. Maybe I should caramelise the top with some extra sugar perhaps. Yes I think that's what I'll try.