Cabbage stuffed with meat is a classic combination, with variations all around the world. There’s Polish Gołąbki, cabbage rolls filled with meat and topped in tomato sauce. A Chinese version is stuffed with pork and mushrooms.
Early American versions involve stuffing the meat inside the cabbage, as The Townsends and Chef Walter Staib have both demonstrated on their shows.
I’ve made at least one other version of stuffed cabbage myself, and it is delicious— if unnecessarily finicky.
The recipe may have been a little old-fashioned by 1953, but Mrs. Edwin Obrecht contributed hers to “Random Ruxton Recipes,” compiled by the Church of the Good Shepherd. The church boasted a well-to-do congregation, and almost all of the recipe contributors I’ve researched were prominent in Baltimore newspapers. The original is fairly rare. I accessed it at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Another version of the cookbook was printed in 1977.
Mrs. Obrecht was born Doris Laura Merle in 1919. Her grandparents were German. Her father, Andrew Merle, was the president of a distillery firm. According to Merle’s 1965 obituary, he “spent the Prohibition years as a broker of medicinal spirits” and then launched his firm, Standard Distillers Products, Inc., when Prohibition was repealed.
Continue reading “Stuffed Cabbage With Parsley Cream Sauce, Mrs. Edwin Obrecht”
