04 Feb 2025
Elena Hogg, founder of local culinary company FOOD by Elena, celebrates the Trojan of the winter vegetables…
Cabbage. Perhaps our humblest vegetable, bringing up notions of simpler times and no-fuss cooking. But nowadays, cabbage has taken on a trendier persona.
Take kimchi, for example, which is essentially a Korean health food made from fermented veggies – more often than not cabbage. All the wellbeing advice points towards its regular consumption to promote gut and heart health, and better immunity.
My husband can’t eat enough of it, but despite being flavoured with heavy lifters like gochujang and garlic, kimchi has never been a favourite of mine.
Nor has sauerkraut, the less fashionable German version. In fact, cabbage in general just doesn’t float my boat. The texture can sometimes be a little squeaky, and there’s a bitterness than catches in my gullet as I swallow.
To say nothing of those pesky gassy side-effects…
Rather an odd choice of ingredient for me to be writing a foodie column about, then, I hear you guffaw. But I have chosen this subject precisely because I have spent so long finding ways to enjoy my leafy nemesis, determined as I am to benefit from all that vitamin C, K, and B6, as well as folate and dietary fibre.
Mmmm.
I’m also attracted by how cheap a head of cabbage is, at under a pound for most varieties, and how long it can last in the far corner of the crisper drawer, like some sort of genetically modified food stuff astronauts eat in space.
The huge versatility of cabbage also scores points with me and earns it a place on the weekly shopping list: whether it be red cabbage, savoy, sweetheart, white, all types can stand up to a roasting, braising, griddling or pickling. Plus there’s the leafier cavolo nero, which is so delicious added to soups or else wilted down in butter, tossed with hazelnuts and used as a bed for pork chops or sea bass fillets.
Alternatively, add a jar of plump cannellini beans to a pan of sliced cavolo nero along with some finely diced potatoes and a splash of Tabasco for a really wholesome weeknight supper.
Kale is another vegetable that falls under the ample brassica umbrella and is delicious eaten uncooked in salad form, perhaps with pine nuts and shaved parmesan all doused in a lemony dressing.
Be warned: the time you save not having to cook it gets spent removing the woody stalks, but it’s worth the effort.
And if you have the patience, leave the lemon dressing to work its acidic magic on the kale for half an hour before eating, to help soften the leaves.
This wintery weather often bullies us out of eating salads, but cabbage has a robustness that beefs up a raw dish and makes it suitable for cold-weather consumption.
Take a slaw, for example. As well as adding the traditional carrot, and perhaps some less traditional apple, try dialling up the flavour punch with red onion, olives, celery and some protein-dense seeds. Swap the mayonnaise out for some pomegranate molasses and this hearty plate imbues just the right level of wintery comfort and nutrition-packed zing. For extra warmth, add some chilli oil to the dressing or, for an earthier flavour, some anchovy sauce.
Cutting the tighter-leaved cabbages (like the red, white or sweetheart varieties) into chunky wedges and grilling or griddling them is possibly my favourite way to enjoy cabbage, and I almost forget I’m not meant to like it that much.
It’s surprising how far you can take the level of char when it comes to cabbage – well-blackened edges make for a nutty and caramelised interior, which is frankly as close to sublime as a cabbage can get, especially festooned with capers for little flavour pops.
Finally, my greatest adversary: stewed cabbage. When I think back to my youth, I can’t pin down whether it was the mushy texture or the drabness of flavour I hated most.
Either way, I have remained sceptical of stewed cabbage well into my adulthood, even while all my other childhood aversions have dissipated, such
as my dislike of peach melba (after ordering one in a restaurant that was so gone-off it was fizzy) or peanut butter (on account of it sticking my tongue to the roof of my mouth like glue –most inconvenient for a chatterbox like me).
However, thanks to my mum, there is a light at the end of the polytunnel. Despite the fact that I cook for a living, my mum brings round containers of her home-cooking once a week or so. Whether it’s a pot of her mackerel pâté, a chunky soup or a lentil curry, it’s always gobbled up greedily by whoever gets to it first.
Most recently, my mum made a sausage and cabbage casserole that I promised I’d try despite my visceral reluctance.
Lo and behold, the saltiness of the sausages paired beautifully with the sweetness she had managed to draw out of the cabbage during the slow braising.
There were carrots and other vegetables too, of course, but most importantly she’d added mustard and some fennel seeds which really lifted the flavour, so that this unassuming and, frankly, aesthetically challenged dish hit the spot perfectly.
Cabbage is the Trojan of the winter vegetables. It ain’t pretty, but it’s heroic and, till the bounty of spring arrives, I’ll take all the heroes I can get.
