Getting back to the Cooking in a French Town book that I reviewed last week, today I tried the stuffed cabbage (pg. 108). I’ve made a lot of Hungarian stuffed cabbage with meat but this is the first I’ve heard of using fish. It’s very different and slightly more complicated but definitely worth a try.
I modified the original recipe which called for crème fraiches. I can’t buy that around here and didn’t want to buy buttermilk to make crème fraiches and then waste a lot of leftover buttermilk. Sour cream was close enough for me. Also, I had a bad experience using too much shallot one time, so I decreased from a whole to a half, but needed more herbs so added ¼ cup.
In case you’ve never stuffed cabbage leaves before, I started taking a series of pictures and decided it would be easier to have a video. I had 2 lbs of fish and it made 11 cabbage rolls (without increasing any of the other ingredients).
Fish Merchant’s Stuffed Cabbage Leaves
1 ½ lb fish fillets, preferably flounder, cod, or whiting (remove bones or skin)
½ minced shallot
¼ C fresh chopped parsley, or dill – whatever you like
¾ C sour cream
1 lemon, both zest and slices
Sea salt and ground pepper
1 medium head of green cabbage
Put the head of cabbage in a pot of hot water and turn the heat on high until the water boils. Boil 5 minutes. Meanwhile, place the fish, shallot, half the cream, the parsley, and a generous sprinkling of salt and pepper into a food processor bowl and run a minute, scrape the bowl and run up to another minute.Carefully dump enough water from the cabbage pot into a steamer or pot that has a rack you can use to set the cabbage rolls. Dump the rest of the cabbage and water into a colander and run some cold water over it. When it’s cool enough, peel off about 8-10 cabbage leaves. It’s OK if they don’t come off perfectly. Smooth out a leaf and pat dry. Trim away the thick part of the stem.
Put about ¼ cup of fish filling in the center of the wide area of the leaf. Sprinkle about ¼ teaspoon of lemon zest onto the filling. Fold the leaf over the filling to completely enclose it. Roll the leaf into a packet. Repeat until you use up your filling. Put the rest of the zest into the other half of the cream.
Bring the water in the steamer (or pot with rack) to a gentle boil and put the cabbage rolls in seam side down. Cover and steam 20 minutes. Toward the end, warm the cream/zest with one slice of lemon juice and stir just until it’s steaming. Place finished cabbage roll(s) on a plate and drizzle over some lemon juice and a little cream.
