Of Cabbages and Kings
Cabbage is one of those vegetables that is good for us in many ways. It’s an excellent source of Vitamin C and a very good source of fiber, manganese, vitamin B6, folate, and omega 3 fatty acids. It also contains properties that help the body produce antioxidants and detoxification enzymes, and recent studies show that it can be instrumental in the prevention of certain cancers. Cabbage juice has even been known to heal ulcers.
While cabbage may be the king of healthy vegetables, it’s not the most delicious. Healthy? Yes. Tasty? Not so much. Most of us have unpleasant memories of coming home from school and running into a wall of smell that almost knocked us off our feet. There’s nothing like that pungent aroma that cruciferous vegetables share. It permeated every nook and cranny of the house and all of the kids in the neighborhood knew what you were having for dinner that night. And they did not envy you.
But I’ve always known cabbage is good for me, so every once in a while I would buy a head and try to figure out what to do with it. I would usually boil it and eat about a fourth of it until I couldn’t take it anymore and let it sit in the refrigerator until its time was up.
Once, instead of boiling the cabbage just in water, I added some tomatoes, onions, garlic and other spices and let it simmer for a while. It turned out to be one of those miracle dishes that was super delicious and impossible to replicate. You wouldn’t think it would be that difficult to recreate something so basic, but I was never able to get the same flavor combination again. And believe me, I tried.
When I moved to Chicago I often ate at the diner down the street. In addition to their soup-of-the-day, they always had sweet and sour cabbage soup, which came with dinner when you ordered the special. It was surprisingly delicious and reminded me of that long-distant concoction I had made that I could never figure out how to make again. So I went looking for a recipe. It was surprisingly difficult to find. The Cabbage Soup Diet was all over the internet so that was all that came up when I typed “cabbage” and “soup” as keywords. I finally stumbled onto the archive site for the rec.food.recipes newsgroup. One of the recipes looked super easy, so I tried it. I now make it regularly.
But there’s a snag. As I was researching the benefits of cabbage to write this post, I discovered that the longer you cook cabbage, the less benefit you get from the cancer-preventive properties. All of the other goodies are there, but if you want the full benefit of cabbage, you should only cook your cabbage for about five minutes. Even so, this is a healthy dish that is very easy to make.
Because this makes so much, I don’t worry about using sugar, but I always only use between a fourth and a half of a cup. If you want to avoid it altogether, honey would work just fine. In the original recipe you just throw everything into the pot without sautéing the onions first, but the oil really brings out the flavors. Without it, the soup lacks body. For the amount of servings this makes, a couple of tablespoons of oil is negligible.
Sweet and Sour Cabbage Soup
1 to 2 Tbsp olive or canola oil
1 onion, chopped
2 to 3 lb cabbage, sliced
juice of 1 lemon
12-oz can tomato paste
28-oz can chopped tomatoes
14-oz can Bavarian sauerkraut
1/2 to 1 cup sugar
salt and pepper to taste
In large pot over medium-high heat, sauté onion in 1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil until wilted. Add all other ingredients. Fill each can once with water and add to pot. Bring to a boil, lower, and simmer for several hours, until cabbage is translucent.
About halfway through, taste for balance of sweet and sour and adjust if necessary.
Makes 8-10 servings
recipe from Dave Weinstein via rec.food.recipes
I liked your “Of Cabbages and Kings” article. The full quote is one of my favorites: “The time has come the Walrus said, to think of other things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings…” Thinking of how sealing smells blots out the smell of things like cabbage, although, for my taste, even better is to make quick pickles with salt, dashi powder, and ginger.