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.

Chili As Apparently Made In Chicago

Keep in mind the small amount of beef in this recipe the whole time we're making this.

Chili 1 pound ground beef 12 scallions or 1 large onion, chopped ½ of a (20-oz) can chopped tomatoes, or 2 chopped and peeled medium tomatoes 1 16-oz can beans, drained ¾ cup water Salt, chili powder, paprika, garlic powder, etc to taste Brown the beef in a large skillet with a lid. Drain the fat unless using very lean meat. Add the onions, tomatoes, beans, and water. Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat, and simmer for one hour. Add the seasonings about 5 or 10 minutes before you turn off the heat. (I've found that simmering dried spices for an hour cooks away all their flavor, which makes the house smell great but leaves the food bland.) Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

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

Since I live in Texas, you'd think I wouldn't have to go up to Illinois and 90 years into the past for a chili recipe. But I was curious to see what might have appeared on tables where chili is a food and not a religion. Turns out that like every other pot of the stuff I've ever made, it starts with beef.

At the sight of the greasy pan, our household's local chapter of the Society for the Conservation of Beef Fat called an emergency meeting. The recipe never mentions draining the meat, but we all agreed that no one wants to greasy chili. I know that some chili purists will mechanically repeat the mantra "fat equals flavor", but this was a lot. Like, you could probably get a half-batch of pizzelles out of this.

Also, the recipe calls for "ground round steak" and we used 80% hamburger. Maybe period-correct meat wouldn't have turned our skillet into a grease pit. And so, we drained the meat and economically saved the drippings for another time.

History doesn't always repeat, but it often rhymes.

Speaking of economizing, Mrs. Mary Martensen's chili only uses a half-can of tomatoes, thus allowing us to save the rest for another day. Tomatoes are one of the cheapest vegetables on the canned food aisle, so you know times are tough when you're splitting them in half. 

Setting aside the can opener, our recipe economizes on time as well as grocery money. This is all the knife-work required for the entire recipe. I think I spent more time peeling the onion than cutting it.

And here is where you can really tell this recipe comes from hard times: this is everything we're using to stretch the beef. Keep in mind how puny the meat looked by itself in the pan. 

The onion slices were impossible to stir into the pan, so I laid them on top and hoped they'd mix in better after they softened in the steam.

Now in Texas, chili is a religion. Multi-generational feuds have been launched over a half-teaspoon of liquid smoke. People with pure hearts and true beliefs can argue for multiple days about whether garlic powder is a heretical shortcut (or if garlic should be permitted at all). But I think all of them would agree that noodles are sacrilege. And even those who permit noodles would agree that you don't boil them for an hour.

However, Mrs. Mary Martensen's chili isn't meant to win any cookoff prizes. It is for you, the housewife of 1933, whose grocery budget consists of a few pennies leftover from last week. Also, this recipe comes from Chicago in the 1930s. It was still an industrial town. No amount of noodle-free purism would hold up against a table full of people who just got home from a long shift. So, noodles it is.

Even after I decided to include the noodles, I thought I'd skip simmering them for an hour. But then I wondered if this would come out better than I thought. Perhaps the noodles absorb a lot of the chili flavors. Or, maybe they would dissolve and turn into an economical thickener. 

In the absence of a lid, we pressed foil on top of the pan as best we could. The chili barely fit in there, so we had to use a lot of pressure to keep it in place. Again, I have to give credit to Mrs. Mary Martensen and the home economics staff of The Chicago American. They made a single pound of beef nearly overflow the skillet.

As is customary with chili, I was going to make cornbread to go with it. Then I realized that the noodles made it redundant. Mrs. Mary Martensen really is looking out for her readers: she got meat, vegetables (if you count a half-can of tomatoes), and bread into a single, nearly-overflowing pot.

I did not stay in the house for the entire one-hour simmering time. When I returned from some errands, every room smelled like really, really good chili. Given the small amounts of seasonings, I was surprised. 

But when the time was close to over, I sampled a spoonful and immediately shook a lot of chili powder into the skillet. I'm going to charitably assume that this recipe's tiny doses of seasonings were meant as a starting point rather than the absolute final amount. Otherwise, anyone following this recipe would have eaten some very bland meat. 

On the positive side, I liked how the onion rings had turned into long noodles. It helped their flavor stand out more than if I'd chopped them. However, the actual noodles had turned to slime. As a result, our chili had become a slithery porridge that happened to have meat in it. You had to imagine your way past a lot of slippery, half-disintegrated noodles before you could like what you were eating.

But before I complain about the noodles too much, I have to note that I wasn't hungry again for hours. Like, some dinners have you drifting back to the kitchen before bed, but with this you're good until tomorrow. And that's worth a lot on a Depression-era grocery budget.

To give the recipe a better shake, I made it again without any noodles. I also tripled the seasonings and added some truly uncalled-for garlic. Omitting the pasta meant I economized on time since I didn't have to get out a strainer and a second pot. Also, the supermarket nearest me sells French bread for embarrassingly cheap, so we still economized on ingredients.

If you triple the seasonings and serve noodles on the side (if at all), this recipe is a pretty good way to make an easy meal-- even if it's not the most exciting. Even without the noodles, that single pound of beef went an astonishingly long way. And it was good enough that I was happy to have the leftovers. I wouldn't take this to a chili contest, but it's great for dinner at home.

Mock Cherry Pie: or, A Book of Cookrye makes a mockery of cherries

If you are looking for an adventurous way to delight and slightly bamboozle your relatives this Thanksgiving, this pie is perfect.

Mock Cherry Pie 1½ cups (5.5 oz) raw cranberries ½ cup (about 3 oz) raisins 1 cup water 1 cup sugar 1½ tbsp (or 4½ tsp) cornstarch 1 cup sugar 1 unbaked pie shell (plus enough dough for a top crust or lattice if desired) Heat oven to 350°. Cut the cranberries in half.* This is easier with scissors than a knife. Place raisins, cranberries, and water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. While they are heating up, mix the cornstarch and sugar, breaking up all the cornstarch lumps. Stir the sugar into the boiling pot, and bring back to a boil. Cook, stirring constantly, until thickened and transparent. Then cool completely. (You can cool it faster by putting the pot in a larger pan of cold water— or ice water if you have an ice maker— and stirring it until it cools off.) While the filling cools off, make the pie crust if you're preparing one from scratch.  Pour the cooled filling into the pie shell. Make sure you leave room for it to bubble and boil up a bit in the oven. Finger-dab or brush water around the edge of the pie crust. Cover with a top crust, or a lattice. Or, if desired, leave the top open. Bake until the crust is golden on top, about 30-40 minutes. *If you don't want to cut all those cranberries in half, you can instead put them whole into the pot along with the water and raisins. Bring to a boil, cover with a lid, reduce heat to a simmer, and cook until you hear the cranberries stop popping. Then proceed with the rest of the recipe. The pie won't taste as convincingly of cherries, but it's still really good. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

I never thought anyone would need to imitate cherries. Even when fresh cherries are out of season, stores always have canned cherry pie. Maybe cherries were impossibly expensive in the 1930s. Or perhaps Mrs. Mary Martensen created this recipe so for the busy home cook who didn't have time to waste with a cherry pitter. Even cutting cranberries in half one at a time is faster than pitting cherries. Or, maybe cranberries used to be so cheap that people needed to disguise them, like someone serving turkey sixteen nights in a row because it was on discount.

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

The halved cranberries kind of look like miniature apples, don't they?

 

Our filling was done only a few minutes after turning on the stove. But as we learned with the honey fruit pie, things go very wrong when you pour steaming-hot filling into a raw pie crust. We're here to make a mockery of cherries, not find fifty new reasons for kitchen profanity. I therefore let the pie filling cool off, after which it slid right into the pie pan without ruining anything.

I was going to make a lattice top out of our excess pie dough, but I had a sudden attack of laziness. So, I just laid some strips across the top and declared it done.

While the pie baked, I decided to try the syrup that remained in the pot. (I may or may not have done a deliberately bad job with a rubber spatula.) And it tasted astonishingly like cherries. You had to carefully examine the flavors before you could tell that something was amiss.

Before the pie had finished baking, I had already filed this recipe away for next fall. When fresh cherries are in season and everyone the house starts buying them by the sack, I start craving cherry pie. But the cherries get eaten too quickly for me to bake them, and I cannot justify swatting everyone else away from fresh fruit.But I know that I won't need to defend cranberries and raisins against anybody.

I don't know if I'll ever be comfortable with an oven this large. Yes, I could put a whole turkey in there if I wanted. But even a full-sized pie looks puny in such a massive space, which makes me feel bad about the wasted heat.

After the pie was baked, it even looked like it was loaded with cherries. The cranberries and raisins had dyed each other as the filling bubbled in the oven, and their respective colors had averaged out to a reasonable approximation of cherry red. You can really see the near-perfect cherry color if we zoom in on the edge of the pie, where the filling bubbled up a little bit as it baked.

But really, I was just amazed at how pretty this pie is.

I would have never thought that cranberries and raisins add up to cherries. But when I brought this pie with me on a visit, none of my friends believed me when I said it is cherry-free. Everyone thought I was testing their gullibility.

The pie doesn't taste exactly like cherries, but it gets unnervingly close. If no one told you otherwise, you would think it was mostly cherries with a few other things stirred in. And even if you were told the truth, you might not believe it. (Again, my friends thought I was lying.)

Because I had enough cranberries to make this again, I tried it without snipping the cranberries in half. I wanted to know whether all that fruit bifurcation was really necessary, or if it was yet another instance of older recipes adding pointless extra steps (which happens surprisingly often). 

Borrowing methods from the cranberry-celery salad, I boiled the cranberries until they popped. Then I added the raisins and everything else. And... the pie still tasted cherry-ish, but it wasn't as convincing. Maybe cutting the cranberries allows all of the flavors to meld, rather than keeping the berries' interiors half-shielded by their own skins. It was still a really good pie, but it wasn't as good of a cherry pie.

I made this recipe because I thought a cranberry-raisin pie would be good on its own. I wasn't prepared for it to actually taste like cherries. If this cookbook tells me that I can mix corn and avocados and it will taste like bacon, I'm not going to argue without trying it first.

Escalloped Corn

Did you know that Chicago is by definition Midwestern?

Escalloped Corn 2 cups canned corn, drained* 1 tbsp butter 2 tbsp flour 1 cup milk 1¼ tsp salt Chili powder, black pepper, paprika, and other seasonings to taste 2 eggs, separated ¼ cup diced ham ½ cup shredded cheddar cheese (mild or sharp, whichever you like) Heat oven to 350°. Grease or spray a medium casserole dish. Melt butter, add flour and mix well. Slowly add the milk, stirring hard as you pour it in. Cook until it comes to a boil, stirring constantly. Reduce heat to medium and cook 2 minutes longer, scraping the pot the whole time. Pour into a large mixing bowl. Mix in corn, seasonings, ham, and egg yolks. Beat egg whites until stiff peaks form, then fold into corn mixture. Pour into the pan. Sprinkle .the cheese on top. Bake until the cheese is golden brown, about 30 minutes. *Use a 16-oz can, or whatever happens to be the closest size on the grocery shelf. All Electric-Mix Recipes Prepared Specially for your Dormeyer Mixer, 1946

All Electric-Mix Recipes Prepared Specially for you Dormeyer Mixer, 1946

 

Today, we are revisiting the Dormeyer mixer recipe book. Mom found it at an antique store for 80¢ when I was tiny. I didn't know at the time that old advertising handouts are so common that most antique stores have racks of them for less than the cost of a candy bar. Therefore, I thought it was it was a special compilation of recipes that were all old enough to be heirlooms by now. So it felt like getting a lot of lovingly passed-down recipes without having to wait for multiple generations of relatives to pass them down. (Because I didn't know about low-quality paper, the book's brittle, browned state made it a rarer treasure.)

Getting to the recipe, today we are making something called "escalloped corn." I guess that tacking an extra "e" onto the word "scalloped" makes it extra fancy? 

This is one of the few recipes that doesn't have any brands in the ingredients. The writers credit "our own Dormeyer kitchens" for the few recipes that didn't come from any food companies. There were no Dormeyer kitchens. They just had their employees send in recipes to round out the book. Given that Illinois has a lot of corn fields once you drive out of Dormeyer's hometown of Chicago, I'm not surprised that we have a corn casserole.

As we soon found out, "escalloping" our corn starts with white sauce.

I'm not going to make any snipes at Midwestern recipes and their apparent aversion to spices. But I will note that I added a truly uncalled-for amount of chili powder.

I know that most casseroles look terrible in the mixing bowl, but this one looked particularly bad.

And now we get to the only reason our escalloped corn is in a mixer instruction book: whipped eggs. I wonder if the Dormeyer people included this recipe subtly promote the extra beaters (sold separately). You can't whip egg whites if you get a single errant drop of yolk in them. Therefore, you have to either pause the recipe to wash the beaters, or get out out a second mixer.

This is a lot of bowls for canned corn.

On a more general note, I really don't think this recipe would exist without mixers. I can't imagine anyone wearing out their wrists to beat egg whites for canned corn, escalloped or not. Even a hand-cranked eggbeater is too much work for canned corn.

Our casserole looked particularly vomitous in the pan. This is why we always cover our casseroles with cheese. (Also, I didn't see the direction to stir the cheese into everything else.)

After seeing how ugly this looked, I was ready to say a lot of mean things about it. Then I tasted a spoonful and instantly stopped regretting that I preheated the oven for this.

But even though I have a dishwasher and multiple electric mixers (they turn up cheap at thrift shops), I didn't like how many dirty dishes were involved in making a casserole. Aren't you supposed to just put everything into a big pan and bake it?

So, when I escalloped some corn again (yes, this was good enough to make again), I reduced our beater count by 50% and dumped the egg yolks into the with everything else. Then I buried the whole mess under seasonings that never made the Dormeyer print edition.

If the goal of this recipe was to achieve greater volume and height, skipping half the steps works better than following the directions. The corn mixture still looks like barf, but now it's extra-fluffy barf.

I liked everything about this recipe except its airiness. Even though it was fully baked, it had the texture of an uncooked mousse-- with canned corn in it. 

 

But with that said, this tasted really good. I don't think you can go wrong with ham, corn, and cheese. The leftovers were a lot better after firming up in the refrigerator overnight. So even though the Dormeyer people wanted to demonstrate the versatility of electric mixers with corn casserole ("It's not just for cakes!"), this is almost certainly better if you just stir it together and put cheese on top.

Hot Potato Salad: or, A salad is only a main dish if you really, really need it to be

Wonderful news everyone! In theory, everyone's SNAP benefits will soon be restored. Clearly, no one will ever starve in this country again. But just in case, let me suggest donating money instead of cans to your local food bank. Food banks often get food at bulk rates, so your money will feed more people than if you did the shopping yourself. And of course, the people working at food banks have a firsthand view of what foods are needed.

With that happy thought in mind, let's look at a recipe from the days when food was hard for most people to get in this country. Of course, those days of American food insecurity are long gone. This week, I've seen a lot of nonprofits closing their doors and declaring their missions complete.

Hot Potato Salad ¼ cup bacon drippings 1 egg, beaten ¼ cup vinegar Salt and pepper to taste 4 cups cubed potatoes ½ cup chopped green bell pepper* ½ cup chopped sweet onion* 1 (12-oz) package frankfurters Boil the potatoes until tender. Meanwhile, cover the hot dogs in boiling water and simmer for 8 minutes.† Partially melt the bacon drippings in a large skillet. Then turn off the heat and stir until it is completely melted. (You want it melted, but not too hot.) Then mix in the vinegar and the beaten egg. Drain the potatoes and add them to the pan, along with the bell pepper and onion. Cook over medium heat until the mixture thickens. Then put on a serving platter and arrange the hot dogs on top. *You won't use the entire bell pepper or the whole onion. Just chop the whole thing and save the rest for another recipe. †If the rest of the recipe isn't ready when the hot dogs' simmering time is over, just turn off the burner under them and let them wait in the water. Note: This potato salad was a lot better served cold-- and without putting hot dogs on it. Source: Armour advertisement, Chicago newspaper, 1943-1945

We know this recipe comes from the era of WWII food rationing because the writers proudly say that frankfurters are "a real point bargain!" The opening paragraph deploys the phrases "an old favorite" and "an old-fashioned meal" in the first two sentences, using exclamation points to try to convince you that you really did used to eat like this before the war started.  

Food must have been tighter than I thought on the home front. This recipe only uses a half-cup each of non-potato vegetables. I economically put the extra vegetables in the freezer to use another time. We may not be on ration points in this decade, but we are getting unnervingly close to calling our time "the prewar years." 

Only the onion in the cup goes into the recipe. We have to carefully measure and count out our onions.

Setting aside ration cards, I think this recipe was printed during the summer. Out-of-season bell peppers seem impossible with a war on. But on the other hand, we had to use three stove burners as soon as we were done chopping.

We're directed to load the frying pan with bacon drippings. That was pretty easy since I have not thrown away any fat since grocery prices shot up.

After melting the bacon grease, we are directed to dump in one beaten egg. I briefly thought that I should temper the egg like a good cook would do. Then I decided "The heck with it! If they wanted me to bother with that, they would have written it down!" So instead of detouring to do things the "right" way, I followed the directions. Besides, at the very worst I'd have hot potatoes with scrambled eggs in them.

To my surprise, the egg didn't scramble at all. Well, it curdled a little bit when I stopped to grab a picture, but I think the people at Armour and Company's recipe development department figured that people tend to cook without pausing for a camera break.

The rest of the recipe went agreeably fast. We only needed to dump everything into the pan and start stirring. (As always, I omitted the sugar. I don't see what it's supposed to accomplish anyway.) I wasn't sure if we were meant to cook the onion and bell pepper before adding everything else. It felt like we should have, but the recipe didn't tell us to. I thought they might be cooked by the time everything thickened, but was ready to eat after thirty seconds. 

I didn't feel like getting all presentational with a big serving platter and artistically arranged hot dogs. But after our previous hot potato salad seemed like it'd be really good as a side dish with hot dogs, I decided to at least cook a few for this one. 

This honestly wasn't very good served hot, mostly because of the still-raw bell peppers and onions. The other hot potato salad was a pretty good main dish, but this one tasted like a salad that got warmed for no reason. I wouldn't be surprised if the Armour people pulled a potato salad recipe out of of their files and hastily turned it into a wartime main dish. And as a main dish, this reeks of "it's the best we can manage in these times." I can easily imagine parents carefully counting out how many wieners each person gets when they dish this up at the table (after all, the meat ration stamps might not make it to the end of the month).

I did try slicing up some of the hot dogs and mixing them in to make a single-spoon main dish, which felt oddly like I was feeding babies. (Slicing hot dogs always does.) Mixing everything together definitely made this easier to serve, but I don't think it was an improvement. It just made things saltier.

I think portion-stretching explains why we didn't cook the onion and bell pepper. If I sauteed them, they would have shrunken a lot and left everyone with a half-spoonful of vegetables per serving (reminder: this is supposed to serve 4 to 6).

But setting aside the hot dogs, the leftovers were fantastic after spending the night in the refrigerator. Like, this is even better than the potato salad with covert gelatin-- and that one was amazing once you got past the strange experience of making it. If you don't like mayonnaise in potato salad, this could easily be the recipe you've been looking for. It has enough vinegar to give it tang without making it too sour. And it has just enough onion and bell pepper to make it flavorful without seeming like you accidentally spilled the whole crudite tray into the spuds. 

If you don't bother with the hot dogs on top, it's surprisingly quick to slap together. Assuming you're at least half-decent with a knife (you don't need to be that good), you can cut up the potatoes and get them cooking, then chop the onion and bell pepper, and have everything ready for the frying pan before the spuds are done.

In closing, I would definitely serve this again. In fact, I'm going to keep this recipe on file for when summer grilling season returns. However, I won't try to force it to be a meaty main dish unless food shortages come back.

Basically, imagine this without the hot dogs. It's really good.

 

Cabbage rolls: Not bad, but not sure if they're worth the effort

Today, we are risking an explosion!

Cabbage Rolls 1 large head cabbage 2 (10½-oz each) cans tomato soup 1¼ cup water       Filling: 2 pounds lean ground meat 2 tsp salt ½ tsp pepper other seasonings to taste ¼ cup finely chopped onion 2 cups cooked rice 2 eggs Place the whole cabbage in the freezer. Leave it for a day or two, then thaw. This softens the leaves so you can work with them. Carefully peel off the leaves. Cut off any pieces of the cabbage core that stay on them. Mix the filling ingredients, adding other seasonings if desired. Place a portion of the meat on each cabbage leaf. Roll it up like an eggroll or a burrito. Then put the cabbage rolls on a rack in a pressure cooker. (You can stack them on each other- there's no need to separate them in the pot.) Pour the soup and water over them. Set the cooker to 15 PSI. Cook for 8 minutes, starting the time when the pressure is reached. Then instantly release the pressure (check your cooker's instruction manual to see how). Note 1: If desired, you can assemble the cabbage rolls a day ahead and refrigerate them until you're ready to cook them. Note 2: If desired, you can freeze any unused cabbage leaves for later use. When you use them, be sure to cook them thoroughly since they were in such close contact with raw meat. But really, they will be mushy and bitter after getting frozen and thawed twice. So you might just discreetly let the trash collectors take them away instead unless you have chickens in the yard.Carmella Oszterling

This comes from my ex's Italian grandmother's recipes. I'm not sure if it's actually Italian or if she copied it out of a pressure cooker instruction book. I really love the note at the bottom: "Maybe cut this in half." You know a recipe makes a lot when someone's Italian grandmother writes that perhaps you should make less of it. 

I actually did have these cabbage rolls at my ex's mother's house. I don't remember if I liked them or not. I was too overwhelmed at being presented to the entire extended family to notice the food, even if it was his mother's cooking. But I think that she skipped the pressure cooker and put them in a Crock Pot. 

However, what should turn up when I was rummaging through the cabinets, but a complete pressure cooker! When I say a complete one, I mean everything. The little rack you're supposed to put in the bottom of it, all the rubber bits, and the weight you're supposed to put on top. And when I flipped it over, I could tell that it had been used a lot.

There were two weights tucked inside it. One of them was worn out.I would love to know how long that took.

I didn't trust the pressure cooker. I've heard too many stories about pressure cookers exploding. Also, I didn't know how the heck to use it. I found the instruction manual online, and also a lot of videos of people. Most of the people showing how to use a pressure cooker talked about canning. It seems like the microwave superseded the pressure cooker (until the Instant Pot arrived) for everything except home canning.

With that in mind, I had to test two things. First, would this thing explode? And if it didn't, would it hold pressure? I don't know how old it is, how worn out it is, or any of that. I decided to take this outside so I wouldn't have to clean the entire kitchen in the event of catastrophic failure.

The grill burner is nearly useless for cooking purposes and leaves horrible soot on every pot, but it came in handy tonight. 

I was afraid to get near the cooker. After all, it could blow at any second. While I paced in the yard at what I hoped was a safe distance, that little weight that's supposed to start wobbling refused to move. The whole apparatus hissed a lot, which might be how it's supposed to work but made me even more afraid to get near it. Was some rubber bit old enough to lose its grip and leak? Was I supposed to give the weight a starting nudge?

Eventually, the little weight started rocking, which apparently means that this thing still holds pressure. Having proven that the cooker worked, I turned off the burner below it and left it for a few hours. I didn't want to touch it until it got completely cold in case it blew up in my hands.

When I brought it in, I removed the foil from below and was so glad I used it. Look at that horrible soot!

And now, it was time to actually make food-- or so I thought. The instructions begin with "Pour boiling water over leaves. Let stand for 5 minutes." But I couldn't even get to that point.  It turns out that cabbage leaves are nearly impossible to peel off intact. The first ones fell right off, giving me false hope.

But after this early success, the rest of them ripped apart as soon as I tried to get them off the cabbage head. This is one of the more intact ones.

 

Also, our leaves (intact or not) were hopelessly rigid. As the directions say, I poured boiling water over them and waited five minutes. That made no difference. I then decided to turn on the burner under the few leaves, at which point I discovered that boiling cabbage smells awful.The whole house reeked, and the leaves were as unrollable as ever.

We've cooked a fair amount of cabbage here at A Book of Cookrye, but I've never boiled it before. Or at least, not for longer than a few brief minutes. I therefore have never deliberately caused such a horrible stink on the stove. The whole house smelled like "You're not getting up from this table until you eat your vegetables."

I've never flunked out of a recipe at the first sentence, but I couldn't handle any more explosive cookers or foul-smelling and uncooperative cabbage. I almost felt someone gently putting their hand on my shoulder and saying "Now is not the time. That's enough for tonight." We had figured out how to get the cooker to pressurize, we had the filling made, and that was enough. We could let all our progress wait in the freezer.

Now, I don't remember where I read this, but apparently you can soften vegetables by freezing them. I think it was some listicle of cooking hacks. It seemed obvious enough-- frozen vegetables are always mushy when you thaw them. So I dropped the entire cabbage into the chest freezer until I was mentally ready for cabbage rolls.

A while later, I decided the time was right to load the pressure cooker with cabbage. Also, everyone else was away from the house. I wouldn't have to field any complaints about the stink. 

In utter ignorance of the smell to come, I put the frozen cabbage in a bowl and left it uncovered in the refrigerator. (We don't have any cabbage-sized containers anyway.) The cabbage started to smell overcooked as soon as it thawed. Seriously, my nose thought I had boiled it all day. I thought that cabbage only smelled bad if you cooked it too long, but apparently freezing it releases the stench too.  The refrigerator reeked within a few hours. Shortly thereafter, the cabbage smell seeped out of the fridge and into the kitchen. It then crept over the entire house. By nightfall, a faint yet persistent odor greeted me every time I came in from outside. I began to dread the others getting home a day early.

The next day, the cabbage had finished thawing and the whole house smelled like it. Nevertheless, I could peel the leaves off perfectly intact as long as I was careful about it. Look at this lovely pile of leaf skins, ready to receive the meat!

Now, each of these leaves had a big, fibrous vein in the center. I didn't know if it would cook soft or not, but I didn't want to eat extra-fibrous almost-woody cabbage rolls. So I carefully shaved off the excess vein. (Once again, let me remind everyone to keep your kitchen knives sharp!)

And now, it was time to make the cabbage rolls! After all our long preparation, this was almost insultingly fast.

Soon, we had a whole container of cabbage rolls ready for the pressure cooker. This seemed like a lot of fuss, but keep in mind that we have stretched the heck out of our beef. There's only one pound of meat in this whole container. Perhaps the extra effort makes sense when you have to feed a whole family with no budget. 

As suppertime approached, I had to face the pressure cooker. This time I had to do it indoors and with a lot of grocery money in it waiting to blow up. 

The recipe calls for two 10½ ounce cans of tomato soup. I was absolutely astonished to find that tomato soup cans haven't shrunk at all in the decades since this recipe was written down.

Well, this is the moment that took so long to get to!

Reminder: this is only one pound of meat.

Actually, I didn't want to cook a massive pot of cabbage in canned tomato soup. So, I went off-book and added a can of blenderized tomatoes. It didn't make much of a difference, but at the time it seemed like it might. 

Thar she blows!

Now, the recipe claims that we should only cook these for eight minutes. At first I thought that was preposterously short for how much raw meat and everything else was in the pot. But the cooker's handle has a handy guide which had some insanely short cooking times. You can allegedly cook rice in five minutes. Even microwaves aren't that fast.  

Eight minutes after the top started to gently rock back and forth, I turned off the stove and prepared to unveil our dinner. This brings me to something I didn't realize about pressure cookers until too late: You can't take a peek at your food. Nor can you give it a quick stir to prevent anything from burning at the bottom. You have to stop the cooking entirely, depressurize the pot, and then reseal and repressurize it if you need to cook things a bit longer.

Grievances aside, the cooker worked exactly as advertised. By the time eight minutes had elapsed, these looked like they'd been cooking all day.

All right, so they're limp and nearly gray. And the semi-congealed tomato on top is not helping. But they actually didn't look so bad once we got them onto a plate.

I honestly don't get the point of wrapping these in cabbage leaves. You can't just eat them like you would egg rolls or burritos. No matter how skilled you are with cutlery, you end up with a slimy heap of leaves on the plate and a brown log of meat.

Maybe I'm not very traditional but I would sooner make a casserole of all of this. But with that said, I do like getting meat, rice, and greens in one easy portion that you can lift out of the pot with a pair of tongs. And the meat itself was incredibly tender, like it had been simmering all day.

I do think these needed more seasoning though. I saw a few variations where you add cheese and other things to the meat, which I think would improve it. But even though these were a bit bland, I was very glad the leftovers were waiting for me.