Brussels sprouts are played out. Kale was a mistake. This winter, embrace cabbage. Affordable, delicious, and astoundingly versatile, it has much more to offer than its reputation suggests.
It is a cliché of food writing to refer to a vegetable as “humble”—the humble carrot, the humble potato—but in the case of cabbage, the cliché is apt. Mark Twain wrote that “cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” Lewis Carroll’s walrus and carpenter discuss topics so unalike from one another that they talk of “cabbages—and kings.” Cabbage, a staple of peasant cuisine across Eurasia, is not merely humble, but the very symbol of humility.
Two thousand years before Twain considered the subject, however, Cato the Elder offered a different view. “Brassica est quae omnibus holeribus antistat,” he wrote: “The cabbage surpasses all other vegetables.” Setting aside the specifics of his argument, which to modern ears will sound oddly focused on the urine of cabbage-eaters, the overall sentiment is spot on.
By weight, cabbage is among the cheapest foods you can buy. (For simplicity’s sake, I’m focusing exclusively on standard-issue green cabbage, and not other wonderful varieties such as savoy and napa.) A USDA database ranked 93 different vegetable categories by price as of 2022.
Continue Reading on The Atlantic
This preview shows approximately 15% of the article. Read the full story on the publisher's website to support quality journalism.