Consider the Cabbage
an exercise (plus eating notes)
Everything I’ve cooked in the past month has had cabbage in it. Cabbage on pizza, cabbage on lentils, cabbage and boiled eggs, cabbage and tuna salad, cabbage pie, cabbage soup. I’ve mostly used white cabbage, and I didn’t plan for it to be the centrepiece of my meal plan for an entire month. But one night, I put it on pizza, and realised that cabbage contains multitudes and so, I decided to explore all of them.
I’ve been feeling deeply uninspired lately, so uninspired that when it gets to about midday, I start counting down seconds to when its an appropriate time to close my laptop and start making dinner. I started as early as 16h30 one Monday — cabbage soup day. I used the bones of this recipe, and cooked it for hours. It being Monday, my fridge was basically empty except for three quarters of a head of cabbage, one carrot, white onion and a jar of sweet peppers. I also had homemade chicken stock in the freezer and some funky kimchi that needed to be stewed into something. I cut the cabbage into chunks, threw it in a pan with the onion and a wad of butter, and cooked it down just a bit till I could fry off some tomato paste in its juices. I then fried some fennel seeds till they started popping and added a tablespoon of smoked paprika and some chilli flakes and let that all sizzle for a minute. Lastly, I added the chicken stock, kimchi and pickled peppers (with all the vinegary juices), closed the lid and let it cook for a looong time.
(As I’m writing this, I’m realising that the only thing I took from the recipe was the cabbage part and maybe the tomato paste part. I’ll make the full one some other time, because it does sound good, although I’d want for more vinegar. )
This soup was rich, pickly, funky and tomatoey and I will make variations of it all winter long. We ate it with thick buttered sourdough, and then again over rice with boiled eggs for breakfast. My only association with cabbage soup prior to this was through Roald Dahl and he definitely didn’t sell it well. Poor Charlie Bucket and his family could only afford to eat ‘cabbage soup’ which sounded a bit more like cabbage water and I think it probably put a whole generation of children off the vegetable entirely. A shame!
Cabbage is what I want lettuce to be. It can be eaten raw, dressed, pickled, charred, stewed, grilled, braised, fermented and still retain its structure and flavour. When braised, it’s jammy and sweet. When sautéed and then grilled (like on pizza) it’s jammy, sweet, salty and crispy. When thinly sliced, salted and lemon-ed, it’s a perfect salad — Lahanosalata. I used to work at a Greek restaurant that served this as a table salad, and there was a woman who’d come in a few times a week for lunch and order a bowl to herself, with a side of hummus and a plate of rosemary fries. It’s the perfect meal, and I want it now. In the past month, I’ve eaten lahanosalata with white rice and chilli oil; on a piece of toast with creme fraiche, a boiled egg and extra vinegar; sprinkled on top of lentils and a pork sausage. I even put it in a quesadilla. I truly don’t think there’s a dish that wouldn’t benefit from a side of lahanosalata — I want to eat it atop a bed of creamy beans, as a side to steak, or next to a huge slice of lasagne. I’m obsessed.
My turning point to total mania happened when I decided to put cabbage on pizza (is this a thing?) I usually never make pizza at home, but I saw some pre-made bases in a deli and after mentally going through the contents of my fridge to see what I could top them with I thought, “Cabbage. Fennel. Bacon. Pizza.” I bought the two bases, a packet of bacon and rushed home.
I mentioned that I’ve been feeling unstimulated lately, even a bit hopeless. Turning to cabbage to reinvigorate my will to feel something seems unhinged, but that’s kind of exactly what I did. The cabbage pizza opened my eyes to possibility.1 To realising that one thing can be many things. I saw the humble cabbage, no longer the boring, farty vegetable left to rot at the back of the crisper drawer, become an unctious pizza topping of delicate sweetness and tang. Perhaps, the cabbage is me, and I projected my desire to make something of myself, to DO SOMETHING, onto a vegetable. Even so, it didn’t not work.
I sautéed the cabbage with olive oil, white onion and fennel seed until it just yielded its shape, but was still toothsome. I then liberally topped the pizza base (which was pre-made with tomato sauce and a few dollops of mozzarella) with the glossy cabbage and studded it with bits of crispy bacon. My oven was blistering hot and I made sure to place the pizza in the top third so that the cabbage could get some crisp and char. To serve, I showered it with some parsley and a tiny amount of crumbled feta, because I had it in the fridge, but it actually enhanced the salty sweet of the cabbage and bacon so I’d use it again.
I only have one (bad) picture of this because I inhaled it and immediately started thinking about when I would make it again. I think next time, I’ll cook the cabbage the exact same way, but instead of bacon, I’ll use Italian sausage, remove it from its casing and crisp it up in a skillet before. The one note I made for myself was “more hard herbs” and I think an Italian sausage should cover that.
It’s Monday as I write this and I face another week of searching for inspiration. I have a whole head of cabbage in my crisper drawer, some lamb mince, laffa and a jar of hot pickled peppers I need to use. I’ve been taken with sundaykitchenau’s instagram recently. Karima-Chloe Hazim is Lebanese-Australian and cooks Lebanese recipes and dishes from the Levant and Palestine, while telling stories of how she learned to cook and eat and how people in the diaspora use storytelling and cooking as a way of bearing witness to their culture, of keeping it alive and of protesting it’s erasure.
Engaging with food content online2 right now forces one into dissociation and cognitive dissonance. I watch cookbook authors name their books after Palestinian ingredients while declaring their unwavering support for Israel. I watch an American woman sprinkle Za’atar on her labne while an Israeli flag hangs ominously in her bio. Karima-Chloe dedicates her cooking and recipes to her Lebanese heritage and speaks widely about the traditions and ingredients of the Levant. She speaks them into an archive determined to support their erasure. One account does little to quell the feeling of hopelessness, especially when one reel is followed by a starving Gazan child dying from a man-made famine constructed by Israel. But it does offer the means to cook with these ingredients and honour the traditions in our own lives. I’m planning on recreating one of her laffeh wraps — spiced lamb mince pressed into the bread and then grilled, and wrapped up with herby cabbage salad, pickles, peppers and some garlicky yoghurt.
That’s tomorrow. Tonight it’s chunky potato leek soup with sour cream and pickley cabbage. I can’t stop.
Not to be dramatic, lol.
especially Instagram.
on Mondays at school we have chicken with rice and cabbage. The kitchen serves all 800+ kids and about 100 adults _every day_ and somehow the chicken is moist and the rice is not mushy and the cabbage is delicious. I've tried doing it at home but I can't crack the secret... I think it's the emulsion that forms when the cooking water mixes with the (probably horrifying amounts of) oil/ margarine. I don't know. But it's silky and has just enough bite and is so so umami. Probably aromat also.
As always, such an enjoyable read Robyn. Cabbage is indeed so underrated and your comment about it being what you expect of lettuce made me laugh - ditto!
Onto Brussels sprouts next, like little mini cabbages with a most undeserved bad rap!