–Lewis Carroll
First, let’s talk a bit about cabbages.
Wild cabbage is thought to have first been consumed by humans thousands of years ago. Historical records show that ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans ate it. In fact, many considered cabbage a delicacy. Diogenes, the Greek cynic (You know the story. He was the one who carried a lantern around ancient Athens looking for an honest man.), is said to have consumed nothing but cabbage and water–not even a dolma for him!
The Egyptians and Romans were more fun, though. They consumed copious amounts of cabbage, to be sure, but their motives were skewed a bit more toward having a good time. They believed that eating cabbage before binging on alcohol would ward off a hangover and allow them to drink even more alcohol. No wonder Tut died at such a young age! It was the partying.
Later, at the height of the Ottoman Empire, the emperors sponsored sports clubs to demonstrate their power and train their cavalries for battle. The clubs also served another purpose. They provided the “bread and circuses” that kept the masses occupied and distracted. For a long time, the two most important Turkish sports clubs were, get this!, The Okras and The Cabbages–an homage to local production of the two popular vegetable crops. I don’t know about you, but I would have put my money on the Cabbages any day. I can only imagine the slime jokes that the Okra team was forced to endure.
During the age of exploration, European ship captains carried barrels of fermented cabbage to treat the wounds of their sailors and to ward off scurvy.
In more recent times, cabbage often has been relegated the background as a cheap food for the poor. Orwell’s 1984 envisioned the miserable life of the urban poor in tenements permeated by the smell of boiled cabbage. Lewis Carroll, though, approached cabbage with a little more serendipity in his poem The Walrus and The Carpenter (quoted above) from Through The Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.
When World War I came along, cabbage took center stage again. The popular fermented cabbage dish, sauerkraut, was way-too-German for patriots in the west and was renamed “Liberty Cabbage.”
More recently, food scientists have extolled the health benefits of cabbage, a vegetable with almost no fat, that is rich in fiber and is high in vitamins C and K. Too, cabbage is a part of the brassica family that includes broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and other cruciferous vegetables. Some scientists believe that regular consumption of brassicas can ward off some types of cancer, protect heart health and manage type two diabetes. Brassicas are also the second cheapest vegetable to consume, after potatoes.
Now that we’ve discussed cabbage, we need to move on to Lewis Carroll’s question about whether pigs can fly.
I’m pretty sure they can. Apparently, they get the window seat.
Here is a recipe for a warming chowder-like cabbage soup I like a lot.
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This recipe was adapted from one that appeared in the New York Times.
