THE TEMPORARY VEGETARIAN
Cabbage’s Sweet Side
Christos Katsiaouni
Zoe Feigenbaum’s cabbage soup, inspired by her grandmother Bess Feigenbaum.
By ELAINE LOUIE
Published: January 11, 2011
CHEFS praise cabbage. They embrace its sweetness. They delight in its crunch in raw slaws and its melting smoothness in cold-weather braises.
Related Recipes
Braised Cabbage (January 12, 2011)
Warm Cabbage and Green Beans(January 12, 2011)
Bess Feigenbaum’s Cabbage Soup(January 12, 2011)
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Evan Sung for The New York Times
Floyd Cardoz’s braised cabbage with ginger and jalapeño.
More often than not, their customers do not share this love.
“I personally love cabbage,” said Floyd Cardoz, who was the executive chef of Tabla in Manhattan until it closed last month. He offered lightly caramelized cabbage wedges that had been spiced with cloves, black mustard seeds, shallots, garlic and ginger. Mr. Cardoz brought out the sweetness of the cabbage, and in the plating of it, its beauty. But few people ordered it.
“They have eaten overcooked cabbage so often, they begin to hate the mushiness and the smell,” he said.
Cabbage is often an unloved, homely vegetable. It’s smelly. It’s cheap. It’s the food of the poor. But those who can get past this initial aversion know it as one of winter’s quiet overachievers.
Right now, when green beans are selling for $4 a pound, and baby spinach for $9 a pound, red and green cabbages from local farms can be had for around 75 to 99 cents a pound. The low price is in part a reflection of cabbage’s longevity. It stays fresh in the refrigerator from two to five weeks, and even longer in farmers’ bins.
The winter cabbage is a “storage cabbage,” said Joe O’Brien, the owner of Healthway Farms in Highland, N.Y., who sells red and green cabbages at the Union Square Greenmarket after stripping off their outer leaves and trimming them down. “They’re bred for flavor, and picked in the fall,” he said. “These are harder and more dense than summer cabbages, which are softer.”
The cabbage is also a sturdy ball of healthfulness, since it is high in vitamin C and in dietary fiber. It has also been linked to protection against cancer.
All those virtues do not make it an easier sell. Marcus Samuelsson, the chef and an owner of Red Rooster Harlem, said, “Cabbage always reminds people of poverty, when people are limited by food.” Optimistically, he suggested that this may be changing. “We’ve come so far with food, we’ve gone full circle; that the fried chicken, the meatballs, are comfort food,” he said. “And cabbage is also comfort food.”
Mr. Samuelsson, who was born in Ethiopia, makes a dish traditional there that he calls simply warm cabbage and green beans. In Ethiopia, braised cabbage is “poor man’s cooking,” he said. “For fine people, the big pieces of meat and fish came later.” Despite its humble roots, the braise is quite rich, with a subtle and harmonious use of spices.
Clarified butter is simmered with ginger, fenugreek, cumin, cardamom, oregano and basil. More spices are added: garlic; mustard seeds; turmeric; berbere, the Ethiopian spice mix; cardamom; ginger; and nigella sativa. In this profusion, no spice stands out. All meld.
The dish is usually eaten with injera, the slightly sour, spongy Ethiopian flat bread, but it is perfectly good with rice. (It also tastes even better the second day, and the third.)
Zoe Feigenbaum, executive chef at The National on the Lower East Side, says cabbage’s ubiquity hurts its reputation. “Because it’s so plentiful and accessible and cheap, people seek things that are more rare and glamorous, like artichokes, morels and kabocha squash,” she said.
At the restaurant, she pays homage to her late grandmother, Bess Feigenbaum, who served her stuffed cabbage with a sweet-and-sour sauce made of tomatoes, brown sugar, lemon juice, raisins, tomatoes and ketchup. Ms. Feigenbaum transforms her grandmother’s sauce into a cabbage soup with a deeply traditional Jewish flavor.
Because the United States does not have a strong cabbage culture, “people don’t recognize its potential,” Ms. Feigenbaum said. “But as far as my Jewish family is concerned, cabbage soup is a year-round delight.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 12, 2011
An earlier version of this article misidentified Zoe Feigenbaum's late grandmother as Beth Feigenbaum.
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