then, from cabbage to watercress, via asparagus and chard amongst others, is a personal take on the most truly vital ingredients of my kitchen.
The iconoclastic lover of heartless cabbage
Cabbages of all sorts have been playing a huge role in the diets of most parts of Europe for hundreds of years. So I’m told, anyway. They certainly played a big part in my youth, which concerns me a lot more. It may be subjective and provincial, but my youth, despite fading into the past, still affects my relationship with food more than European history does. If the opposite is true for you, I’d love to read your dissertation on cabbage and its role in the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
I know it’s an old Irish cliché now, but I did in fact eat a lot of cabbage as a child. I can at least spare you the weary and hackneyed description of the smell of over-boiled cabbage permeating the house, simply because I have no memory of it. My mother never over-boiled cabbage. When she used it in classic bacon ’n’ cabbage (yes, we did have it a couple of times a week), it was added to the pot lateish with the lid kept off, and cooked until soft but not disintegrating. How’s that for enlightened?
I do, however, have a reference for the type of horrific food smells that can cause distressing memories. No, not from my friends’ houses, because everyone in the town was similarly enlightened. (Thanks to the town council for sponsoring that comment.) In New Zealand, there is a similar modern trauma amongst the newly sophisticated regarding the smell of long-boiled mutton, often combined with cabbage as well. I knew about it from hearsay before I ever experienced it. Like the cabbage legend on this side of the world, their version is often used as a way to laugh at country cousins or the ignorance of an earlier generation.
When I finally came nose to nose with the olfactory reality, I was living in a small town in the middle of the North Island of New Zealand. One quiet day of many, I went out for a cycle to pass the time. I could have gone swimming or cricketing or rolling bowls around the green like everyone else, but I was feeling unsociable. Miles out of town, I was overtaken by one of those serious bike people, decked out in the kind of tight-fitting, outrageously gaudy outfit that would get cyclists thrown out of all but the most hedonistic of gay clubs. He pulled over and made small chat, always delighted to meet someone interested in bikes, and so on. He was not a young man, and thus was very proud of overtaking youngsters. He was also running a small cycling club in a part of the world that didn’t care much for the sport, always on the lookout for new members. I wasn’t exactly fit at the time, but I was young and had my own bike, so I guess I was fair prey. I was also foreign and way too polite. Against my better judgement, I followed him to his nearby house to sign up to a glittering cycling career.
It was one of those classic Kiwi country homes, a tiny shack of timber with a tin roof and a small front porch on which there is always an old couch with cushions held together by the dog or cat hairs of their usual occupants. While the club chairman went into the back room to get forms, I stood in the kitchen. There was a tall pot on the stove. I recognised it from the legend. In it goes a piece of a dead sheep with plenty of water, and maybe a couple of onions if you’re really cooking. On goes the lid, heat turned down low, and off to work you go. When you get home, you call it dinner. Or maybe when you get home, you put the cabbage in – I never did pay enough attention. Anyway, the smell was vile, even sulphurous. I wasn’t professional enough to do an analysis, but I would swear there was definitely cabbage in this one. The smell wasn’t just coming from the pot – every part of the house reeked of it, from the endless daily ritual. By the time the chairman came back with the paperwork, I was a couple of miles down the road, moving a lot faster than when I’d met him. Saved by the reek of long-boiled dinner.
Because I have no childhood odour trauma about cabbage, I have never been uncomfortable with it, which must be why I still find it one of the most useful, affordable and flexible vegetables, both at home and in a restaurant kitchen.
The first book I usually turn to when trying to decide what flavours to pair with a vegetable is Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book. Although I’ve never knowingly cooked directly from it, the book works as a springboard to an almost endless range of possibilities because of Grigson’s passionate but detailed research. True to form, she doesn’t hide her disdain for what she considers the coarser greens. On spring cabbage and its inability, or disinclination, to form a heart, she quips that ‘heartlessness is never a desirable quality’. It’s a fun line she must have enjoyed writing. I would have liked an evening in her company to discuss it – wouldn’t even have minded losing the argument, though an argument it would have been.
However, she clearly adored some cabbages, and rightfully placed the Savoy at the top of the pile. The Savoy is a highly cultivated vegetable, with a sweet flavour and wonderfully crunchy texture which makes it just as good eaten raw or cooked. Despite the recent trend against long cooking of cabbages, I think the best way to cook Savoy is to braise it for an hour or more in olive oil, wine and stock, with the possible addition of spices and the extra sweetness of tomato. After that you can add anything you fancy that goes with cabbage: I like chickpeas, lentils, seeds such as fennel, coriander, caraway and cumin, sweet peppers, fennel, even potatoes in a reverse of the classic method of adding cabbage to spuds. Not all at the same time, mind. Pick a well-matched two or three. In Paradiso we use it as a wrapping for dolmas and timbales, as well as a braised side dish. Savoy isn’t the most obviously smooth wrapping material, but the flavour makes it worthwhile and it only takes a little effort to flatten the leaves if you need to.
Even after losing my imaginary argument with Ms Grigson, I still love spring cabbage, partly for its lovely soft, pliable leaves and its relatively mild flavour, but mostly because it arrives in early spring just when we are tiring of the stored winter foods. Putting away the winter things and moving on is one of the most exciting times in the vegetable year. It changes your focus from the past to the potential future. Spring cabbage has the flavour of new growth, of life and hope and the mad optimism of a new year.
The brassica that divides people most, however, is surely the Brussels sprout – an eccentric name for a gloriously eccentric-looking plant. Brussels sprouts are compact cabbages in mini form, with concentrated flavour. But what an astonishing-looking plant they come from. It grows about 60cm (2 feet) high with a few dozen sprouts clinging to the stalk, while out of the top it puts up what it clearly believes to be a decent attempt at a cabbage. And it’s not far wrong. The leaves are indeed good cabbage, and have the advantage, culinarily speaking, of clinging to life when the sprouts and most other winter greens are gone. These should, however, be cooked like winter rather than spring greens. They are tough, having been hanging around all winter, and are best braised or thinly sliced and fried.
The sprouts themselves are as adaptable as the entire range of cabbages put together. They are best known as a simply boiled vegetable – hard or soft, as you like it. But they also fry well, with spices and tomato. They are good in creamy gratins with strong cheeses. The sprouts can also be shredded leaf by leaf and added to salads, soups or stews. Brussels sprouts with chestnuts is a classic combination, one that gets a frequent run-out at Christmas, but they also go well with other nuts, including walnuts, hazelnuts and macadamias. I believe they work with blue cheese too, but not everyone agrees with me. You have to admire that about Brussels sprouts – as much as they are pigeonholed by local tradition, they are also just as happy dressed up in exotic gear.
The thing about sprouts is that very few people can agree on how to cook them. Leaving out those who simply can’t abide the vegetable at all, the rest of us who profess to love them – there is apparently no middle ground with sprouts – are very subjective about how they should be cooked, so it is very difficult to say anything other than this is how I like mine. For everyone who likes them lightly steamed, there is another who likes them almost mushy, and really loves them that way, so you can’t say it’s wrong or ill-advised. Every winter at Paradiso I try a new twist on sprouts. The recipe to follow later with a blue cheese cream and spiced potato gnocchi is this year’s model. I love it, but I accept that it’s a personal thing.
There is also a relatively new cabbage that we used for the first time last winter. In fact, it’s relatively new to everyone except the Ethiopians. It was only in the late 1950s that it was first