... about as unseasonable an article as I could imagine.
We all remember that smell, don’t we? The insinuating stink of cooked cabbage, particularly overcooked cabbage, lingering for hours around the house, or pervading corridors near school dining halls. When I was little our school lunches were served in a parish hall a good half-mile away from school, and I remember that stink hitting my nose as we walked in one day: the cabbage accompanied slimy pig’s liver and lumpy mashed potato – how did we ever survive?
In scientific terms, the smell of cabbage is a combination of various sulphur compounds, including hydrogen sulphide, the main constituent of the stink of rotten eggs. Raw cabbage has little odour, it is the cooking process that produces the smelly mix, and the smell of rotting cabbage also includes a compound called methyl mercaptan, which I remember reading about in the Guinness Book of Records as the smelliest substance on Earth.
However, talk of cabbage also gives rise to other vegetables. One of the principles of evolution is that of natural selection, “the survival of the fittest”, and the wonderfulness of cabbage could be ascribed to this, or rather to a man-made version of it. Wild cabbage, (Brassica olearacea var. olearacea) is a member of the large plant family Brassicaceae, formerly known as Cruciferae, after the cross-shaped four-petalled flowers displayed by its many species, which also include mustard, night-scented stock, wallflowers and the well-known rock garden perennials arabis, alyssum, and aubrieta. Cabbage is also that rare thing in the plant world, a vegetable actually native to Britain, as well as various other parts of Europe. Which exact form of wild cabbage is the ancestor of what we grow today is a matter of considerable discussion amongst botanists and others concerned in such matters, not least since it has been around for thousands of years.
Brassica olearaceae is a headless cabbage, one without the dense, round concentration of leaves in its centre. Various selections of this form have given rise to modern-day kale, oh so fashionable in your breakfast smoothie (drinking anything green at that time of the morning would not help me wake up in the least, but each to their own …), and selections of different properties shown by more-or-less wild formswere made by cabbage breeders (they exist …) to produce more and more the tightly-large-headed varieties with which we are familiar today. Another recent introduction here, the dark red “cavolo nero” of Italy and the now little eaten Collard greens are “acephalic” (headless), so taxonomically close to the wild form, while various different parts of the plant were selected to produce broccoli and purple sprouting (from the flowers), Brussel sprouts (from the buds), and another form little eaten (to our loss) in Britain, namely Kohlrabi (from the “meristem”, the core swollen area above the roots).
All that from a hardy lump of a vegetable that never deserved the revulsion induced by school dinners; and didn't we all hate being told how good it was for us? Have you ever tried sprouts raw in a salad with a mustardy dressing? Delicious. Broccoli and the like only need boiling or steaming till just cooked, cheese sauce does work with cauliflower, while even "ordinary" cabbage can be amazing, if carefully dealt with. I know this is not a cookery article, but, if I may: try cooking it slowly: sliced thin or chopped small, with finely-chopped apples, cloves, some dark brown sugar and a little water. This traditional English method makes red cabbage ambrosial, and many other cuisines use the other best method, of stuffing cabbage with a well-seasoned meat and starch (maybe rice) mixture, and cooking it slowly in something like a tomato-based sauce. Pickled cabbage can also be wonderful. Slow cooking is also the key to breaking down the sulphur compounds and their propensity to produce lots of gas, and it’s particularly good with a hearty wintertime meal, such as a good roast pork joint with lots of crackling.
Mind you, with the weather we’ve endured on-and-off lately, it sounds rather tempting now …