Cabbage au Gratin: or, Never has failure tasted so good

Mrs. Mary Martensen has let me down.

Cabbage au Gratin 3 cups chopped or shredded cabbage, boiled or steamed 1 egg 1½ cups milk ¾ tsp salt ⅛ tsp. pepper ¾ cup fine dry bread crumbs 1½ cups grated cheese (sharp) 1½ tbsp. butter Heat oven to 350°. Grease a casserole dish. Beat egg, milk, salt, and pepper together. Set aside. Place a layer of cabbage in the baking dish. Sprinkle lightly with the crumbs, then with the cheese. Repeat these layers until all the cabbage is used up. Pour the milk over the whole dish before adding the last layer of breadcrumbs and cheese. Bake until golden on top, about 35 minutes. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Lured by a 50% markdown, we at A Book of Cookrye have been cooking a lot of cabbage lately. I didn't realize how much I liked cabbage until I learned about haluski, so the discount has only encouraged me further. If prices hold steady at twenty cents above nothing, I might actually get enough practice to shred cabbage into fine confetti. 

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

Before reading the recipe, I thought we would have to make a white sauce and then melt cheese into it. But Mrs. Mary Martensen's method allows us to economize on time as well as grocery money. We were more than halfway done after we had all our ingredients gathered together.  

Today's recipe involves a lot of cheese, which always makes vegetables good. It also avoids boiling the cabbage into slime. It's amazing how delicious vegetables can be when you don't boil them until quite dead. I am tempted to say that steaming the cabbage in the microwave (as we did) reduces heat in the kitchen and thus makes this recipe a lot more summer-friendly. But we still had a half-hour baking time ahead of us.

In case you forget this recipe came out in the middle of the Depression, have a look at how parsimonious Mrs. Martensen is with breadcrumbs. Even pulverized stale bread must be carefully rationed (if you even had enough bread for any of it to go stale).

After layering everything together, we only needed to dump in the eggy milk. Before I read the recipe directions, I had assumed we would be making cabbage in a cheese sauce. But this was shaping up more like a cheesy cabbage quiche.

Having reread the directions and confirmed that everything in the baking dish was as it should be, we only needed to put the final layer of crumbs and cheese on top. I even remembered to dot the top with butter.

I felt silly for putting a relatively small pan of cabbage into the oven for over half an hour. So, I decided to economize on oven heat by pushing dinner to the back corner of the oven and use the rest of the shelf space for cookies. Or at least, that was my excuse.

Our recipe says to bake for 35 minutes, and Mrs. Mary Martensen's time proved to be exactly correct. After I had baked it for precisely that long down to the last tick of the timer, it had a beautiful golden-brown cheesy top.

I couldn't wait to dig in, but some daft fool had decided that this was a good time to make cookies with dinner in the oven. This meant I had to let the cabbage au gratin wait for at least fifteen minutes while I finished baking. When I finally got a spatula into our dinner, I found that the beautifully-browned top layer concealed a watery mess.

I didn't know which was weeping harder: the casserole dish on the countertop, or me as I thought about how much sharp cheddar was lost in this failure. Tasting this only made me more irate because it was amazing and wrong at the same time.  It's hardly a revelation that vegetables and cheese are friends, but sharp cheddar and cabbage are an extraordinarily good match.

But this recipe did not work. The egg coagulated the milk into some horribly slimy semi-cheese curds. Meanwhile, the actual cheese had not melted. Instead, the shreds were half-softened and almost rubbery. And the soggy breadcrumbs interspersed throughout only made everything worse. It was edible, but I needed a lot of willpower not to throw it away. 

 

I shared this online, asking if I had missed a step that would have been obvious when the book was new. Everyone agreed that the recipe had nothing to prevent it from turning into a soggy mess. 

To Mrs. Mary Martensen's credit, this allowed you to get something shoved into the oven with minimal effort. It definitely is a vegetable. And maybe if you serve it with bread to sop up the juices, it's not bad after a long day. But mostly, I hate how good this wanted to taste. Everything in it went together so, so well. If it wasn't a soupy failure, it would be amazing. But it can't live up to its own ingredients.