Cabbage Escape from the Holidays

Renate Stendhal

If you are like me (and why wouldn't you) the sacred and profane festivities and related food orgies of the holidays are a dread. I found my personal salvation from stuffed turkeys in eating cabbage.

In my socially ambitious family cabbage was  considered low-class, a smelly signal that someone wasn't yet taking part in the post-War Economic Miracle that  befell Germany in the fifties and sixties. White cabbage was only eaten as Sauerkraut in my family, but sometimes in winter my mother went back to her Westphalian roots and served braised red cabbage with Sauerbraten. In Paris, during my early years of ballet and underground theater, cabbage became a welcome renegade when Xmas loomed. I would spend the holiday in a café, then come home to my  towel-size kitchen under the roofs and cook my cabbage. I scorned the traditional fussy ingredients -- bay leaf, whole cloves, juniper berries, red wine vinegar, and sugar, simmered for 2 hours, with flower added at the end.  None of that for me. I would lightly caramelize a big onion, add the chopped red cabbage and a roughly chopped green apple (Belle de Boskop, firm, tart and fragrant) in proportions that made intuitive sense, braise it for 15 minutes with salt and pepper and that was it.  There was no need for sugar if you chose the right apple; no need for spices if you used a good salt (Fleur de Sel  from Bretagne) and freshly ground black pepper. And there certainly was no need for endless simmering – I never had two hours between rehearsing and job hunting. I loved the simplicity, the look of the green apple turned pink, and  the rich, sweet-sour taste. I couldn't care less about the pungent smell -- I had turned the "proletarian" dish of my homeland into my own "bohemian cabbage" –a dish that cost only a few sous and marked my chosen status as an "exile," an independent outsider in the opulent City of Light.   Then I moved to Berkeley, California. The West Coast had brought every new set of ideas to America and the world, from Free Speech, Hippies and Apple computers to Alice Waters' California Cuisine. Playful, inventive, childlike, this New Age food Mecca was toying with Mexican and Asian flavors . Cabbage from Old Europe was not on the menu. Imagine my surprise when I had to face what I called "Turkey Tyranny" not  just once, but twice. Thanksgiving, a mere four weeks before Xmas,  could somewhat be alleviated by the new California invention of "Tofurkey ," the ersatz bird made with tofu.  I had to realize, however, that my cabbage dish could not be integrated into a tradition of  overcooked green beans and undercooked Brussel sprouts.    No matter.  I enjoyed my dish all through the winter. I now added a Valencia orange to the caramelized onion, the chopped cabbage and now Granny Smith apple. I chopped up both fruits in equal-size pieces, big enough to keep their distinct presence in the mix. I also shaved a teaspoon of orange rind (of course organic) into the sauté pan. The 15 to 20 minutes of cooking allowed me to  warm up a bit of quinoa (precooked in a Chinese  rice cooker) and fry a few slices of tofu with a pinch of Gomasio, a Japanese blend of toasted sesame seeds and salt. The dish, in its "pioneer" style tasted just right: more juicy and sweet from the orange, more spicy from the rind, and altogether so far from its German origins that I found it exotic—my bohemian red cabbage morphed into California Cuisine. (An earlier version of this text was published in Kitchen Works.)