Cabbage stinks and bloats and doesn’t taste good? Not correct! The chef, author and epicurean Vincent Klink clears up a stubborn prejudice on the “Day of Healthy Eating”.
At the age of twelve I was sent to a monastery school with monks because of my school phobia and laziness. It’s hard to imagine today, I had to choke on cod liver oil every day because of my malnutrition. The rancid whale oil shook me violently every time. At boarding school, I found this taste even worse than the smell of cabbage. I loved cabbage, but I couldn’t figure out why you should eat it when you could do other, more useful things with it.
Back then, as a boy of barely seventy pounds, my eyes wandered daily through a book in which my idols really hit the ground running. They were little rabbits, graceful and funny, drawn in the style of the children’s bestseller “Struwwelpeter” and colored with delicate colors. Nowhere else could I find this book in which rabbits fought. They didn’t go at each other with swords. No, they had hollowed-out heads of cabbage put over their paws as boxing gloves and slapped their fur vigorously with them. The memory of these fights lasted for many years, just as the cabbage smell of the boarding school later thickened into a heavy haze of indigestion in the army.
As a soldier I learned to stand up straight and stoicism at the lowest gait, if possible still under the turf or right in the mud that the tanks had stirred up. The military educational goals didn’t work for me, because flatulence in no way helps the marcher to more speed and certainly not better blood circulation in the brain. In any case, I wasn’t very suitable for taking orders. Recruit Vincent was promoted three times during the drill and then demoted each time. I blamed it on the canteen cabbage smell. In short, cabbage was my destiny and pursued me far beyond my apprenticeship as a cook.
Cabbage smells like fennel
Then, twenty years ago, in the midst of the new kitchen crossover fad, my eyes and those of gourmets turned to Japanese and Chinese. So I discovered rather late that Kohl only smelled like unaired closets in Sweet Old Germany. Nowhere in the world is so much cabbage eaten as in Asia. Consequently, these vast stretches of land must be clouded by the smell of Prussian barracks and the smell of cabbage. I asked myself: what do the heroes of the smoking woks do better than the German cook?
In truth, cabbage smells at least as refreshing as fennel, paprika or leeks. So how can a German journalist credibly put the headline “stink bomb vegetables” into the world for a Brussels sprouts story? That’s how it was written, and nobody raised any doubts.
I want to explain once and for all what is going wrong with cabbage in German kitchens. The frost-hardy cabbage is an almost indestructible plant and, in contrast to the potato, also tolerates frost. All types of cabbage are cruciferous and contain mustard oil, which always has a hint of horseradish. This plant family is called “Brassicales” in Latin. Of these, around 400 genera with around 4000 species grow worldwide. All of this stuff is more or less edible, and when you add it all up, we come up with a whopping 1.6 million different little plants.
The recipe
Roasted pointed cabbage with Mornay sauce and mashed potatoes (serves 4)
Ingredients for cabbage and puree:400 g floury potatoes; a bit of salt; 1 small pointed cabbage (approx. 700 g); 1 onion; 1 shallot; 300 grams of mushrooms; 1/2 bunch of flat-leaf parsley; about 100 ml milk; 30 grams of melted butter; some nutmeg; 2 tablespoons clarified butter; some pepper from the mill; 2 tbsp butter
For the cheese sauce:2 shallots; 2 tablespoons butter; 2 tablespoons flour; 1/2 l milk; 1 tsp Instant Organic Vegetable Stock; 150 g mountain cheese; 1 pinch nutmeg; 1 pinch grated lemon zest; Salt, pepper from the mill
Preparation:Peel the potatoes, cut into quarters and cook in plenty of salted water until soft. Remove the tough outer leaves from the cabbage. Wash the cabbage, cut in half and cut each half into 2-3 columns that hold together at the stalk. Blanch the cabbage wedges in a saucepan of salted water for about 10 minutes, then remove and drain. Peel the onion and cut into fine rings. Peel and finely chop the shallots. Clean the mushrooms and cut into thin slices. Rinse the parsley, shake dry and finely chop.
For the mashed potatoes, bring the milk to a boil separately. Drain the potatoes, put the pot with the drained potatoes back on the stove. Shake the pot and contents well until the potatoes have broken down and a lot of white potato fluff has formed. Press the potatoes through a press, gradually add the hot milk and beat everything with the whisk. Fold in the melted butter and season with salt if necessary and finish with a pinch of nutmeg.
Fry the onion in a pan with clarified butter, add the blanched pointed cabbage and sauté well on all sides. Season with salt and pepper. Sweat the shallot in a pan with 2 tablespoons of butter, add the mushrooms and sauté, season with salt and pepper. Finally mix in the parsley.
For the sauce, peel and finely chop the shallots and sauté in a small saucepan with 2 tablespoons of butter. Add the flour and stir in the milk with the whisk. Add the vegetable stock powder, bring everything to the boil and simmer for a few minutes. The sauce should have a creamy consistency, possibly bind with flour butter. Finely grate the cheese, remove the pot from the heat, add the cheese and let it melt. Season with nutmeg, grated lemon zest and some salt and pepper. Arrange the mashed potatoes on plates, place the roasted cabbage next to them and baste with the cheese sauce, sprinkle over the mushrooms and serve.
It’s fair to say that nature’s generosity could be taken as an example. But we want to narrow down the whole cabbage madness and not turn to the swedes et cetera, but take a closer look at the leafy cabbage varieties.
These plants contain exceptionally healthy ingredients, including sulphur: Until the late 1970s, it was primarily considered a pollutant or, at best, a fertilizer. Gardeners and farmers did not apply sulphur, because the sulphur-fertilizer fell from the sky onto the fields without any action. Even if today people lament about fine dust, against the pollution that hung over us indestructible citizens in the 1970s, one could speak of the purest mountain air today in the densest traffic.
When I was a boy in the sixties, I visited my grandmother in Essen. Every day she wiped the raven-black windowsills. The famous Edgar Wallace London smog was nothing more than exhaust gas from factories, coal-fired power plants and, of course, private heating with lignite and hard coal products. Forty years ago, the industry started installing the first flue gas desulfurization systems, which didn’t do the cabbages on the fields any good.
Eat to enjoy
The sulphur-requiring types of cabbage kept complaining more and more, because sulphur, to a certain extent, is indispensable for almost all plants and is of great value for their healthy growth. In many vegetables such as onions, garlic, mustard, radishes, radishes, but also in asparagus, sulfur compounds determine the taste. In addition, countless other ingredients and flavors could be listed.
I don’t like it when people eat food and don’t think about the good taste at all, but constantly pray to themselves about what healthy ingredients could lead to a longer life. But this much should be briefly mentioned: All these sulfur compounds have been shown to reduce the risk of many types of cancer. In short, more than 130 individual compounds emerge from the sulfur alone. This incredible variety, and this applies to all foods, actually makes it impossible for the food industry to recreate such taste experiences.
In the cabbage plant tissue, enzymes and substrates are embedded separately. So if vegetables are cut up, both come into contact with each other and break down and also form other connections. The oxygen helps with this, and one can simply speak of oxidation. Well, and it is precisely this oxidation that causes an unpleasant smell and often violent internal winds.
So if you want to prepare wholesome cabbage, you should handle the vegetables as quickly as the Asians with their woks. In addition, in Asia, cabbage dishes are usually not reheated, but each meal is freshly prepared. Anyone who handles the cabbage in this way will experience something completely new.
