The chefs who’ve made cabbage cool: how lowly vegetable became trendy and finally got its due
- Kimchi, sauerkraut, coleslaw, bubble and squeak, Buddha’s delight – fried, stuffed, sautéed, raw or preserved, cabbage is a staple food in much of the world
- It’s long been seen as a cheap, everyday food, but young chefs rave about its versatility and texture and are using it in surprising ways and pairings
Here’s a sentence that might come as a surprise: cabbage is cool. That taken-for-granted vegetable, that sturdy, dense staple of many a poor, ancestral homeland, is finally getting respect.
“It’s all about how it is prepared, how it’s elevated,” says Paul Kahan, a James Beard award-winning chef in Chicago and self-professed cabbage freak.
He thinks that because cabbage has mainly been associated with sustenance, it has not been given its due.
Cabbage is part of most of the world’s cooking history. Perhaps most famously, it was one of the only sources of sustenance in famine-ravaged Ireland in the mid-19th century. Thus the classic Irish dish corned beef and cabbage, not to mention colcannon.
In China, there’s cabbage sautéed with bean curd. In England, cabbage cooked with potatoes and other vegetables in bubble and squeak. In Norway, the hot and sour surkal. In the US, coleslaw. Fermented and pickled cabbage dishes abound, including kimchi in Korea, and sauerkraut in Poland, Germany and other parts of middle and Eastern Europe. Stuffed cabbage rolls are part of just about every cuisine, form golabki in Poland to holishkes in Jewish cooking to sarma in Croatia.
There’s more, but the point is: in all times and places, cabbage has been valued for its plenteousness, cheapness, long shelf life, and ability to be preserved for an even longer shelf life. It can be eaten raw or cooked in pretty much any way a vegetable can be cooked.