The Inquiry of I leaf it to you!

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Dear Tamar:

They (Vogue, The Guardian) say it’s the Year of the Cabbage. That’s fine, but I’ve never had a stuffed cabbage that I love. The Polish (?) version, with dill and tomato sauce, always leaves me full but with a meh. Is there a great stuffed cabbage recipe?

Thank you,

I leaf it to you!

Dear I leaf it to you!

The news that it is the Year of the Cabbage—which I also read—took me by surprise. Every year has been the year of the cabbage, as far as I’m concerned. But I have noticed cabbage proliferating like mushroom spores in farm stores and on menus over the last little while. Cone cabbage, which I hadn’t even seen until two years ago, began to pile up in apple crates at my favorite stands—it made me laugh out loud on a particularly dim day because of its resolute hat-tiness.

I want to take this opportunity to digress…to digress, and say that while I’ve been truthful in writing that I hated most foods as a child, I never hated cabbage. (Bizarre, I know.) This wasn’t because I was blessed with a special peasant virtue, or had a unique microbiome that communicated its need for non-soluble fiber particularly clearly, but because my mother had a way of cooking cabbage that was so unlike all others, and so unarguably lovable, that I didn’t know about cabbage’s lesser variations—including the stuffed one you mention—until I left home. (Yes, I ate in restaurants. The 1980s or 1990s were not the Year of the Cabbage. Most restaurants didn’t serve cabbage.)

My mother’s cabbage was a whole head of finely sliced cabbage cooked in olive oil, with a good amount of salt, until completely wilted and caramelized. The resulting dish was sweet without being cloying, as savory as french fries and as comforting as rice. Some of the cabbage was tawny and jammy. It was all spoon tender. That was cabbage as I knew it and—other than the little plastic pot of slaw that came with my annual lobster dinner—it was cabbage in toto.

Later in life, I learned of the ubiquity of cabbage crimes in their most common forms: A) Undercooking, B) Under-seasoning, C) Over-salting, D) Over-saucing. These errors are so habitual that it’s a miracle we held the faith long enough to make it to the Year of Cabbage—a testament to the vegetable’s inherent goodness.

My mother’s cabbage was the first dish I learned to cook, and it was years before I made it any other way—the charred cabbage that is so ubiquitous on restaurant menus these days is usually A) and B). Cabbage slaws are usually B) or C), and stuffed cabbage is either D)—in the case of the Polish (?) kind or C) in the case of the French chou farci, of which I judged a competition just last year. Too much or too little is too common in the cooking of cabbage! (Forgive me, if you can…)

Eventually, I started roasting cabbage, sliced into wedges. I think this is a way we sometimes cooked it at Chez Panisse. That’s also where I learned to boil wedges of cabbage in very salty water. Both treatments are simple and rewarding—the first demanding at the end the lightest sprinkle of red wine vinegar, a smattering of parsley, and chopped toasted nuts, the second a dousing with good olive oil or a dollop of salsa verde.

I also began loving cabbage cooked like my mother’s, but with lemon zest and chopped parsley and mint added, tossed with a short pasta. When we began, a year and a half ago or so, to hold weekly Sunday taco dinners, I began making a cabbage salad that quickly became a Sunday staple: finely sliced cabbage, well-salted and left for 30 minutes, then rinsed and pressed a bit, dressed with sunflower oil and sesame seeds. This salad is my current favorite way to eat cabbage, except maybe for the following, which I’d never codified as a recipe before now. It’s a sort of cross between a Lions’ Head meatball and steamed cabbage rolls. I’ve used elements of each as I’ve tried to record what I do when I make it.

Lion’s Head stuffed cabbage rolls

• 1 whole head cabbage, ideally round, but also cone, Savoy, or Napa

• 1/4 cup finely minced scallions, both white and green parts until the green gets too fibrous to easily chop, or shallots

• about a 1-inch piece of ginger, peeled and finely minced, 1 quite heaping tablespoon

• 1/3 cup finely chopped cilantro

• 500 g minced pork, ideally with 20% fat or higher

• 2 tablespoons Shaoxing rice wine or white wine

• 2 tablespoons soy sauce

• 2 tablespoons oil from a jar of chili crisp

• ½ teaspoon salt plus more for salting the boiling water

• ½ teaspoon sugar

Dipping sauce from The Woks of Life

• 1 teaspoon sugar

• 1 tablespoon hot water

• 2 tablespoons soy sauce

• 1 teaspoon rice vinegar

• 1 teaspoon chili oil

• 1 teaspoon finely minced garlic

• 1 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds

• ½ teaspoon sesame oil

Bring a large pot of water to boil. Salt it well. With a sharp knife, remove the core of a round cabbage. If using another variety, remove its leaves. Add the whole cabbage to boiling water and cook until the leaves loosen from the core and are tender, 4-6 minutes, or separate the largest leaves and medium-sized leaves and add them,cooking for less time. Remove and drain. Trim off the thick veins of the largest and medium-sized leaves, leaving only the leafy part. Stop removing veins when you get to the very small ones. You may have some leaves remaining, but better than running out! Set the cabbage aside.

Combine all of the stuffing ingredients and mix very well in a large bowl. Divide roughly into twelve equal portions. To assemble, overlap two cabbage leaves. Add a portion of stuffing in a slightly elongated ball or cigar shape. Fold and wrap to encase the stuffing. Place the cabbage rolls, seam-side down, into a wicker steamer basket, using two levels of steamer baskets. Steam over medium heat for fifteen minutes. Remove and serve with dipping sauce.

To make dipping sauce, dissolve the sugar in the hot water. Add remaining ingredients, and dip!

Dear cook, I hope you find this a stuffed cabbage recipe that doesn’t disappoint! There are so many ways to go wrong with cabbage—as I laid out in points A)-D) above, but there are even more ways to go right. Start with my mother’s cabbage, and make your way to this stuffed one. As for the rest, I leaf it now to you.