Cabbage à la Crème

History

Cabbage à la crème is a printed recipe in Mary Randolph's The Virginia House-Wife, an 1824 cookbook widely described as the first regional American cookbook. As printed: 'Take two good heads of cabbage, cut out the stalks, boil it tender with a little salt in the water, have ready one large spoonful of butter and a small one of flour rubbed into it, half a pint of milk, with pepper and salt, make it hot, put the cabbage in after pressing out the water, and stew it till quite tender' — boiled cabbage finished in a butter-flour-milk sauce. Culinary historian Leni Sorensen, annotating the recipe, observes that the milk Randolph calls for 'would have been much more like our modern half and half,' that the book contains four cabbage recipes, and that cabbage was valued as a storable winter vegetable at the Jefferson family's Monticello tables. The recipe carries a French title but the record does not document who ate the dish by social class, a peasant-to-middle-class transformation, or a specific French bourgeois lineage. (Text caveat: the recipe dates to the 1824 edition; the Project Gutenberg copy is a later 1860 printing with an 1831 Washington preface.)

Ingredients

• 2 heads of cabbage
• salt
• 1 large spoonful butter
• 1 small spoonful flour
• 0.5 pint milk
• pepper
• salt

Instructions

1. Cut out the stalks from two good heads of cabbage. Boil the cabbage tender in salted water. While the cabbage cooks, prepare a cream sauce by rubbing together one large spoonful of butter with a small spoonful of flour. Heat this mixture with half a pint of milk, seasoning with pepper and salt until hot.
2. Press the water out of the boiled cabbage. Put the cabbage into the hot cream sauce and stew it together until quite tender.