Vegetarians should be particularly careful to soak every description of cabbage in salt and water before cooking. Otherwise the vegetarians will probably eat a considerable portion of animal food.
Here occurs an opportunity for the recipe for an elegant dish, which the French call Perdrix aux Choux, which is simply
Partridge Stewed with Cabbage, etc.
A brace of birds browned in the stewpan with butter or good dripping, and a portion of a hand of pickled pork in small pieces, some chopped onion and a clove or two. Add some broth, two carrots (chopped), a bay-leaf, and a chopped sausage or two. Then add a Savoy cabbage, cut into quarters, and seasoned with pepper and salt. Let all simmer together for an hour and a half. Then drain the cabbage, and place it, squashed down, on a dish. Arrange the birds in the middle, surround them with the pieces of pork and sausage, and pour over all the liquor from the stew.
This is an excellent dish, and savours more of Teutonic than of French cooking. But you mustn’t tell a Frenchman this, if he be bigger than yourself.
The toothsome Pea has been cultivated in the East from time immemorial, though the ancient Greeks and Romans do not appear to have had knowledge of such a dainty. Had Vitellius known the virtues of duck and green peas he would probably have not been so wrapt up in his favourite dormice, stuffed with poppy-seed and stewed in honey. The ancient Egyptians knew all about the little pulse, and not one of the leaders of society was mummified without a pod or two being placed amongst his wrappings. And after thousand of years said peas, when sown, have been known to germinate. The mummy pea-plant, however, but seldom bears fruit. Our idiotic ancestors, the ancient Britons, knew nothing about peas, nor do any of their descendants appear to have troubled about the vegetable before the reign of the Virgin Queen. Then they were imported from Holland, together with schnapps, curaçoa, and other things, and no “swagger” banquet was held without a dish of “fresh-shelled ’uns,” which were accounted “fit dainties for ladies, they came so far and cost so dear.” In England up-to-date peas are frequently accompanied by pigeon pie at table; the dove family being especially partial to the little pulse, either when attached to the haulm, in the garden, or in a dried state. So that the crafty husbandman, who possesses a shot gun, frequently gathereth both pea and pigeon. A chalky soil is especially favourable to pea cultivation; and deal sawdust sprinkled well over the rows immediately after the setting of the seed will frustrate the knavish tricks of the field mouse, who also likes peas. The man who discovered the affinity between mint and this vegetable ought to have received a gold medal, and I would gladly attend the execution of the caitiff who invented the tinned peas which we get at the foreign restaurants, at three times the price of the English article.
Here is a good simple recipe for Pea Soup, made from the dried article:
Soak a quart of split peas in rain-water for twelve hours. Put them in the pot with one carrot, one onion, one leek, a sprig or two of parsley (all chopped), one pound of streaky bacon, and three quarts of the liquor in which either beef, mutton, pork, or poultry may have been boiled. Boil for nearly three hours, remove the bacon, and strain the soup through a tammy. Heat up, and serve with dried mint, and small cubes of fat bacon fried crisp.
Green-Pea Soup is made in precisely the same way; but the peas will not need soaking beforehand, and thrifty housewives put in the shells as well.
Harmless and nutritious a vegetable as the Bean would appear to be, it did not altogether find favour with the ancients. Pythagoras, who had quaint ideas on the subject of the human soul, forbade his disciples to eat beans, because they were generated in the foul ooze out of which man was created. Lucian, who had a vivid imagination, describes a philosopher in Hades who was particularly hard on the bean, to eat which he declared was as great a crime as to eat one’s father’s head. And yet Lucian was accounted a man of common sense in his time. The Romans only ate beans at funerals, being under the idea that the souls of the dead abode in the vegetable. According to tradition, the “caller herrin’” hawked in the streets of Edinburgh were once known as “lives o’ men,” from the risks run by the fishermen. And the Romans introduced the bean into England by way of cheering up our blue forefathers. In the Roman festival of Lemuralia, the father of the family was accustomed to throw black beans over his head, whilst repeating an incantation. This ceremony probably inspired Lucian’s philosopher—for whom, however, every allowance should be made, when we come to consider his place of residence—with his jaundiced views of the Faba vulgaris. Curiously enough, amongst the vulgar folk, at the present day, there would seem to be some sort of prejudice against the vegetable; or why should “I’ll give him beans” be a synonymous threat with “I’ll do him all the mischief I can?”