I can’t tell which branch of old world Europe messed up cabbage for most people, but whoever it was you can be sure it was the ones who just boiled it as if that would do the trick. I’m sorry on behalf of cabbage for its PR problems because there are a lot of good things in its favor, not to be limited to cheapness, the fact that it keeps in your refrigerator for really almost forever, and if you make it right it makes your house smell like an old wise woman loves you a lot. So yeah, this is precisely the wrong time to tell you how to make this since it’s finally warming up in Austin and the snow is melting everywhere else, and if you ever needed a recipe for braised cabbage you needed it last month because February breaks hearts. Which is why I made a bunch of cabbage soup in February and because I don’t know anything about quantities I bought an extra head of cabbage that I didn’t even use, and it’s been sitting at the bottom of my refrigerator since then. I dug it out a few days ago fearing that it had rotted and I would need to “compost” it (I mean, throw it in my back yard) but it looked totally unblemished and I had read this recipe over at amateurgourmet.com (which is also where I got the recipe for Veselka’s cabbage soup, by the way, but I can’t find it now) so I was like, okay, cabbage, I will give you a second chance.
And, officially, holy shit. I had always thought that cabbage on its lonesome needed a lot of butter to taste this good, but it turns out that braising cabbage makes it just taste buttery, and yes, like an old wise woman loves you. I realize that I’m three quarters German and so maybe I have a stronger cabbage affinity than your average camper but cabbages cost like sixty cents and you need to eat more vegetables, no matter what you say to the contrary, narc.
So, here are the ways. Cut up a cabbage in wedges, two carrots in chunks, and one onion in wedges also, put a quarter cup of olive oil all over the top, and kosher salt, and pepper. Cover it, put it in a oven at 350 for an hour, turn over the cabbage wedges and take the lid off, crank the heat to 400 and let it all brown for fifteen more minutes. That’s all. I know this is not a recipe in the typical way and you could just as easily read the version of it linked to above, except I found that the cabbage was already braised all to hell after an hour, and the other recipe says to give it another hour, which sounds scary to me but I’m also okay with my tweaks since they halve the amount of time this would take.
I think the key to most vegetables is 1) olive oil 2) high heat 3) kosher salt. Really. Also, for anybody who doesn’t know what’s up with kosher salt: it is the freaking BEST. Sea salt, whatever. I haven’t exactly figured out what’s so magical about kosher salt, but I suspect that since the grains are flatter (the better to cover the surface of a meat to kasher it) kosher salt dissolves in food faster and gives you a more accurate sense of how salty something is right away–unlike granulated salt, the little cube kind, that takes a little longer to blend in. Or something. Chemicals. Thank you.
