skygiants: (wife of bath)
[personal profile] skygiants
Thank you to everybody who voted to tell us what to do with our cabbage!

In the end, "Cake Filled With Cabbage" squeaked into the lead (by one vote! a breakneck race!) and so we embarked upon this recipe:



(Transcript:

Shred 1 head cabbage (about 2 pounds), sprinkle with salt, and wrap in a cloth to squeeze out the water. Then cook until brown in 1 cup butter or oil. Saute 1 cup chopped onions separately in 4 tablespoons butter, and mix with the cooked cabbage. Make a yeast dough [see Doughnuts, page 138], and roll it out into 2 sheets. Grease a baking sheet with butter or oil. Lay one sheet of dough on the baking sheet, cover with the cabbage, and cover with the second sheet. Pierce it all over with a fork, allow it to rise, brush it with the egg [wash], and bake about 45-50 minutes.)

We were a little nervous about the fact that it wants the same dough as the book's doughnut recipe, but in fact this turned out really quite good! Based on a tip from a Midwestern friend of Slavic origin, we have tentatively identified it as a recipe-translation-to-Yiddish-to-English from pagash, or 'Slavic pizza.'

Biggest challenges: it would have been SO nice if the recipe defined an oven temperature but we realize this is possibly asking too much of 1938
Would we make again: yeah actually! but probably with a higher vegetable-to-butter ratio in the filling ....
Would we ask the internet what 1938 recipe to make again: it turned out pretty okay this time so stay tuned! I definitely do want to experiment further in this cookbook at some point.





Doughnut dough! It doesn't actually have any sugar in it, it seems that in 1938 you got your doughnuts sweet by putting a lot of jam in the middle, which is why you can also use it for things like cabbage pizza. In other news, we were attempting to halve the recipe but we did not remember to halve the yeast so everything occasionally got very big. Fortunately [personal profile] genarti has watched a lot of bake-off so she knows how to slow a rise. We also had to add quite a bit more flour than the recipe suggested to get it to stop sticking to everything, so we ended up probably with more dough overall than we really should have ...




"A WHOLE STICK of butter?" said Beth. "...well, I understand more about your grandmother's kugel recipe now."
"We don't technically have to use the entire stick," I said. "We could halve it, like we do my grandmother's kugel recipe."
"No," said Beth, bravely, "we're following the recipe! This is a historical recreation!"
"Okay," I said, "in that case, don't forget, I am also going to need two more tablespoons of butter, separately, for the onions."



(I don't know why they specify that the onions and cabbage must be cooked separately and THEN mixed together. But again! historical recreation!)




Assembly! I could probably have gotten it into a more symmetrical shape if I had tried. But I did not try.



The final product!



The side salad is also made out of cabbage ... and we still have a quarter cabbage left ....... but I think honestly whittling down 3/4 of a cabbage in a week is FAIRLY RESPECTABLE, all things considered and all other vegetables delivered.

Date: 2020-07-15 01:25 am (UTC)
sophia_sol: photo of a 19th century ivory carving of a fat bird (Default)
From: [personal profile] sophia_sol
Oh that recipe is fascinating, and far more plausible than "cake filled with cabbage" sounds like it ought to be! I'm glad it turned out so well. That really is an outrageous amount of butter though.

Date: 2020-07-15 02:27 am (UTC)
cofax7: climbing on an abbey wall  (Default)
From: [personal profile] cofax7
cabbage calzone?

Date: 2020-07-15 02:32 am (UTC)
sovay: (I Claudius)
From: [personal profile] sovay
cabbage calzone?

If I had to choose between the two, I would definitely call it calzone rather than pizza. It also makes me think ([personal profile] genarti has already heard this) of a Cornish pasty that got really lost.

Date: 2020-07-15 05:02 am (UTC)
vass: Small turtle with green leaf in its mouth (Default)
From: [personal profile] vass
That is delightful.

Date: 2020-07-15 03:04 am (UTC)
loligo: Scully with blue glasses (Default)
From: [personal profile] loligo
I would absolutely eat that!

Date: 2020-07-15 03:16 am (UTC)
elsane: clouds, brilliance, and the illusion of wings. (Default)
From: [personal profile] elsane
I am torn between two reactions, one is, that looks really quite delicious and not at all as horrifying as the title suggested, and the other is, holy hell that is a lot of butter!
Edited Date: 2020-07-15 03:16 am (UTC)

Date: 2020-07-15 03:37 am (UTC)
teenybuffalo: (Default)
From: [personal profile] teenybuffalo
Oh thank Heaven it's not sweet. I read the word "cake" and leapt to the wrong conclusion.

That looks delicious. I would absolutely make it for myself and housemates. The butter doesn't even seem disproportionate; an entire cabbage goes a long way.

Date: 2020-07-15 04:13 am (UTC)
genarti: Small orange kitten hiding under open newspaper. ([misc] cut the world down to size)
From: [personal profile] genarti
As did we all! Honestly, it's really much more of a stuffed bread. In fact, the stuffed cabbage recipe looks like it's a lot sweeter than this one, which is why I started privately rooting for this one to win the neck-and-neck race in the polls after I looked into the details.

The stick of butter is for only half a cabbage, though. We halved the recipe; the original wanted a full cup of butter.

Date: 2020-07-16 05:44 pm (UTC)
cofax7: climbing on an abbey wall  (Default)
From: [personal profile] cofax7
My quick-and-easy cabbage recipe is to sautee it with a chopped onion and then throw some balsamic vinegar on it at the end. Courtesy of Bittman; it's easy and very tasty, and goes really well with a sausage.

Date: 2020-07-15 05:53 am (UTC)
From: [personal profile] pengwern
this looks absolutely delicious, and not at all what I was expecting out of cabbage cake! I....was expecting jello, which is not at all right for the period? maybe??

Date: 2020-07-17 08:06 am (UTC)
From: [personal profile] pengwern
oh, huh, I forgot about the victorians and their extravaganzas, and also that agar probably hadn't spread yet, even if google tells me it was in use for.....microbiology by the nineteenth century, and still further fell down the wiki hole at which point I realise jello, is made, from,, gelatin...

(small living jello creatures sound like a delight! if slightly macabre and necromantic.)

I'm also mildly curious about the cabbage soup with milk. Is it...sour creamy?

Date: 2020-07-15 07:17 am (UTC)
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
From: [personal profile] pebblerocker
That's a lot better than the title led me to imagine! It looks really nice and definitely edible.

Date: 2020-07-15 09:14 am (UTC)
rushthatspeaks: (dirk: be uncertain about this)
From: [personal profile] rushthatspeaks
It sounds as though they want the cabbage caramelized but the onions not, in which case they need to be separate because if you try to cook them together the onions will burn before the cabbage gets hot enough to caramelize.

... also I hope the recipe just assumes that everyone puts salt and pepper in everything, because the concept of this whole thing without salt is terrifying to me. Unless the butter is salted, but even then I think it would need a couple of pinches more.

Date: 2020-07-15 09:24 am (UTC)
littlerhymes: (Default)
From: [personal profile] littlerhymes
Amazing! I love the assymetry. Very aesthetic.

Date: 2020-07-15 11:02 am (UTC)
st_aurafina: Rainbow DNA (Default)
From: [personal profile] st_aurafina
That actually looks really tasty!! Like a cabbage pastie.

Date: 2020-07-15 12:06 pm (UTC)
lirazel: An outdoor scene from the 2005 film Pride and Prejudice of Lizzie and her aunt and uncle reading at the foot of a tree ([film] extensive reading)
From: [personal profile] lirazel
Fascinating! As a southerner, I think that's about the right amount of butter ;)

Date: 2020-07-18 12:39 pm (UTC)
lirazel: Abigail Masham from The Favourite reads under a tree ([film] reading outside)
From: [personal profile] lirazel
Oooh! Do you happen to remember the name of the book? I'd love to look into that.

Date: 2020-07-18 12:53 pm (UTC)
lirazel: Anya from the animated film Anastasia in her fantasy ([film] dancing bears painted wings)
From: [personal profile] lirazel
Oh my gosh, how could I not want to read a book with that title? Thank you!

Date: 2020-07-15 01:29 pm (UTC)
dolorosa_12: (sunflowers)
From: [personal profile] dolorosa_12
Amazing! I love the addition of the cabbage side salad.

Date: 2020-07-16 02:00 pm (UTC)
dolorosa_12: (ani-me)
From: [personal profile] dolorosa_12
Kohlrabi-apple salad is indeed delicious!

Date: 2020-07-15 06:43 pm (UTC)
chestnut_pod: A close-up photograph of my auburn hair in a French braid (Default)
From: [personal profile] chestnut_pod
Cabbage and a cup of butter stuffed in bread. This! is! the! Ashkenazi! way! My Albanian-Jewish ancestors would have called this a torta. (Related to but not the same as the Spanish-then-Latin-American torta, which retains the idea of "bread with things" but isn't stuffed in this way.)

Date: 2020-07-16 04:03 pm (UTC)
chestnut_pod: A close-up photograph of my auburn hair in a French braid (Default)
From: [personal profile] chestnut_pod
It is! Think of the tortilla, the little torta, especially the Spanish kind. It’s much more closely related to the French “torte,” also frequently translated as “cake.”

“La torta” also often refers to a specific kind of sandwich that is in some cases closer to this sort of pastry-bread, and people will use the anglicism “el sándwich” or “el emparedado” for, say, a club-type sandwich.

(Ah, my Romance linguistics degree comes in handy after all!)

Date: 2020-07-15 09:59 pm (UTC)
evelyn_b: (Default)
From: [personal profile] evelyn_b
I wasn't sure what to expect from "Cake Filled With Cabbage," but this sounds delicious. I wish I were eating it right now!

Date: 2020-07-17 03:29 pm (UTC)
lokifan: black Converse against a black background (Default)
From: [personal profile] lokifan
This still seems horrifying to me, but less than I thought it was gonna be!!

Date: 2020-07-17 10:39 pm (UTC)
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
From: [personal profile] lannamichaels
That looks really good and absolutely not at all what I expected.

Date: 2020-07-19 06:21 pm (UTC)
adrian_turtle: (Default)
From: [personal profile] adrian_turtle
Many years ago, I was informed that cabbage strudel (filled with cabbage, onion, and caraway seeds) could prevent hangover. I didn't try it, because I wasn't drinking. But it wasn't the silliest thing I've seen at a potluck.

Date: 2020-07-19 09:51 pm (UTC)
obopolsk: (Default)
From: [personal profile] obopolsk
I was not expecting this outcome, but this looks delicious.

Date: 2020-07-20 01:46 am (UTC)
sandrylene: Scott Pilgrim generator based pic of me (Default)
From: [personal profile] sandrylene
So I also made sort of effectively this this week, though less accurate historical recreation than your very precise butter measurements went with, heh. I think because maybe last post someone linked to a recipe? And on Friday I felt like I ought to take advantage of a day I was willing to turn on the oven.

Anyhow. I made both a cabbage version and a potato and scallion version (it should've been chives. I looked at the huge block of frozen-together chives I have in my freezer, went "nope, that's too many at once" then proceeded to chop all of two bunches of scallions and put them in anyhow, so really I have no idea what I was doing).

I feel like I would prefer both just straight up calzones or just straight up pierogies and that this weird middle ground is not an improvement? Not bad, though. I'm glad you enjoyed yours! :)

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