Cabbage Boasts: A Sentence That's Also A Recipe
Cabbage rocks. Yes, that's a grammatically correct sentence.
Hey, y’all, Carlo here. A break from our regularly scheduled narrative programming.
I’ve recently been reading (and enjoying) Stephen King’s On Writing, and it’s worth a read if you’re interested in writing at all, especially for his brief chapter on grammar. This section reminds us that you can, “Take any noun, put it with any verb, and you have a sentence. It never fails. Rocks explode. Jane transmits. Mountains float. These are all perfect sentences. Many such thoughts make little rational sense, but even the stranger ones (Plums deify!) have a kind of poetic weight that’s nice” (King, 114).
Upon reading this section, I proceeded to have a brief and silly text conversation with a friend that was made up solely of these unexpected noun-verb agreements. What I found is that it’s exceedingly fun for these nouns/verbs to be foods/fruits/vegetables/etc. Here are some favorites:
Apricots sanitize.
Cabbage boasts.
Alliums confound.
Pistachios respond.
Now, I don’t expect you to be that interested in my texting history. But what about the thought experiment of translating Cabbage boasts as a sentence and idea into a recipe? As my high school Latin teacher Mr. Aymar would say, now we’re cooking with goose grease. Or should I say, Goose greases?
Here’s a recipe that attempts to interpret the idea of Cabbage boasts into something delicious you can actually cook. Cabbage itself does quite a bit of boasting already, but to up the ante, I wanted to combine multiple ways of preparation into one recipe (raw, roasted, and pickled).
Read on to find the full recipes, and thanks for indulging in my brief aside while I’m writing more fiction.
Stuffed Cabbage with Coleslaw & Pickled Cabbage (a.k.a Cabbage Boasts)
Makes 6 servings
Ingredients
1 medium cabbage head
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 pound ground sausage
1 tablespoon fennel powder
2 tablespoons oregano
2 teaspoons red chili flakes
1 (5.3-ounce) block Boursin cheese
2 cups cooked jasmine rice
3 cups tomato sauce, or 1 (12-ounce) jar passata
1 green apple, cut into matchsticks
1 carrot, sliced into strips
¼ cup mayonnaise
¼ cup Greek yogurt
¼ cup apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons stone ground mustard
2 tablespoons hot honey
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Pickled cabbage, for serving (here’s a good recipe)
Labneh, for serving
Heat the oven to 350°F. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Separate 13 leaves from the head of cabbage and drop them in the boiling water, stirring occasionally for about 5 minutes. Prepare a large bowl of ice water while the cabbage cooks. Transfer the cabbage leaves to the bowl of cold water and set aside.
Heat a large skillet with the olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the sausage and sauté for 5 to 7 minutes, or until the bottom layer of the meat starts to brown. Do your best to flip the sausage so that the browned meat is facing up; or you can simply break up the sausage with a wooden spoon. Finish sautéing the sausage for another 3 to 5 minutes until it is cooked through. Transfer the sausage to a large bowl and add the fennel powder, oregano, chili flakes, rice, and Boursin cheese; you could drain the sausage on a paper towel, but the grease brings some extra flavor when it’s added to the rice and cheese. Mix until thoroughly combined and set aside.
Make the stuffed cabbage. In a 13 by 9-inch baking dish, pour in 1½ cups of tomato sauce and spread it so there’s an even layer on the bottom of the dish. Take one of the cabbage leaves and shake off any excess water. Lay it flat on a cutting board or clean surface. Add 3 tablespoons (or a bit more) of the pork-rice mixture to the middle top of the leaves (not near the thick stem). Roll the top of the cabbage leaf over the filling and tuck in the sides while rolling the leaf until it’s tucked together like a burrito. Place the cabbage roll into the tomato dish. Continue this process until all the boiled cabbage leaves are rolled and filled. Pour the remaining 1½ cups of tomato sauce over the cabbage rolls. Cover the dish with foil or a lid and bake in the oven for 40 to 50 minutes, or until the cabbage rolls are tender and fully translucent.
While the cabbage cooks, make the coleslaw. Use a mandolin to shred the remaining cabbage into thin slices. In a large bowl, add the shredded cabbage, green apple, and carrot. Make the dressing by combining the mayo, yogurt, apple cider vinegar, mustard, and hot honey in a medium bowl or Pyrex measuring cup. Season with salt and pepper and mix until emulsified. Pour the dressing over the slaw, season with more salt and pepper, and mix until well-coated. Taste and adjust for seasoning.
Take the cabbage rolls out of the oven and let cool for a few minutes. Serve in a bowl or plate with a healthy portion of slaw, some pickled cabbage and labneh on top.
Love this story, recipe and the illustration! Great job S&P!