Greetings, my adoring public! It is I, your beloved Little White Lab Rat, reporting on another recipe from our Mormon culinary past. This one comes from the Improvement Era of February 1961.
And oh, what a glorious recipe it is: Party Cabbage!! Because who does not think of cabbage as festive? Imagine the guest who knocks at your door and is greeted by the pervasive aroma of boiling cabbage?! Add to that the piquant accent of onion, and your home will be a perfumed bower, sure to put everyone in the party mood! No?
It is a simple recipe:
Party Cabbage
1 medium head of cabbage
3 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons minced onion
1 tablespoon flour
1 cup sour cream
2 teaspoons vinegar
1/2 teaspoon sugar
salt to taste
dash pepper
paprika
Cut cabbage into 6 wedges and cook until just tender in boiling, salted water. Melt the butter, add onion and cook until tender but not brown. Add flour and stir in sour cream, vinegar, and seasonings except paprika, and cook until thickened, stirring constantly. Pour sauce over cabbage. Sprinkle with paprika.
Here you see the cabbage cooking, filling the air with billows of fragrance.
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Here, too, are the ingredients for the sauce, measured and ready … although my slothful minion neglected to put the paprika here, and so it is missing from the divine plated dish:
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It was, as I foresaw, among the most elegant offerings a rat could serve to his guests. Aforesaid slothful minion asserts that cabbage is not her idea of party food, but, as she must subsist largely on vegetable matter, she likes the sauce well enough, and it was prepared easily and quickly enough, that she will certainly use this sauce from time to time to enliven her dreary dinners. (She recommends increasing the amount of onion, though.)
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She says that the addition of the sauce helps make the vegetable seem more like a meal and less like an ingredient.
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Par-tay!!!
It doesn’t look any worse than our special meal, “Jack Gallup Soup” which was potato soup (boiled, sliced potatoes with some milk and butter) named after a family friend who dropped in unexpectedly one night for dinner when we were having our usual poverty fare. (We were living in Southeastern Idaho at that time – 1961).
Cabbage…potatoes…reminds me of the old pioneer “recipe.”
Potatoes for Each Day of the Week
Sunday: peel, steam and mash; add milk, butter, salt
and then steam and beat up like cake batter until nice
and light
Monday: bake potatoes in the skins
Tuesday: peel and bake with roast beef, cooking them
under the meat
Wednesday: Kentucky-style
Thursday: peel, steam and serve whole
Friday: peel, cut in thin slices lengthwise, sprinkle with
pepper and salt, fry on a greased griddle greased with
butter, and turn like pancakes
Saturday: potatoes boiled in their jackets
I always get nervous when I see that Little White Lab Rat is doing anything…
Mmmm… Boiled cabbage and mayo.
I like cabbage. Always have.
This minion likes cabbage, too … but not how it makes my house smell!
I too like boiled cabbage but have a hard time with a sour cream white sauce and onion over it.
Little White Lab Rat might find a recipe at cooking.nytimes.com that you like even better. Actually, we’ve found lot of good recipes there. (PS: I do not work for the NYTimes and do not love to cook a lot.) I also do not care much for cooked cabbage, except, occasionally, stuffed cabbage rolls.
The Little White Lab Rat dines only on the finest Mormon-sourced recipes.
The Lab Rat’s slothful minion, however, appreciates the tip.
I’ve missed the Little White Lab Rat and thought maybe she had succumbed from all of her past experiments.
What are Kentucky style potatoes?
Googling suggests they’re scalloped potatoes of one kind or another.
Interesting…Saute the cabbage (cut smaller, of course) rather than boil it, and that looks like a type of recipe i’ve found in assorted forms in community-organization-type cookbooks up here in Alaska. (Of course, we’re more limited in what sorts of vegetable can grow in a garden here. Why the rest of the world is quite so into cabbage, i’ve never been quite sure.)