A Red, Red Cabbage

Oh my Luve is like a red, red cabbage

That’s newly sprung in November;

Oh my Luve is like the melody

I can never quite remember.

So fair art thou, my bonnie lad

So deep in luve am I;

And I will luve thee still, my dear

Till a’ the pans gang dry.

By Amelia, after Robert Burns’ original, and probably quite a lot better poem A Red, Red Rose.

Another literary diversion before I get to the delights of making Sweet and Sour Red Cabbage with Apple (because much as I can make recipes complicated this one really isn’t)- I’m fairly sure someone told me once that in his novel Hangover Square Patrick Hamilton writes about the distinctive smell of boiled cabbage in an Earl’s Court flat.

Having dug through the internet a good long while trying to find the reference and coming up cabbage-less, I reluctantly took Hangover Square off the bookshelf. I read it this time last year, probably not the best time for a book described on the back as ‘capturing the premonitions of doom that pervaded London life.’ I couldn’t bring myself to delve again into the ‘drunken hell’ of George Harvey Bone just for a quote. I would make a dreadful journalist.

However, the Financial Times rescued me with an article on Brussels Sprouts, one of the cabbage’s brassicacea cousins. It says: “overcooking releases sulforaphane, the “boiling cabbage smell” that Hangover Square author Patrick Hamilton managed to parlay into a literary genre, but you probably don’t know that sprout stems make amazing walking sticks, as strong and whippy as malacca cane, and that certain varieties are grown for the particular purpose of their manufacture.”

I can just imagine the Faber & Faber meeting now, “We’ve got a lot of Bildungsroman and Techno-thrillers coming through, Melanie anything from your side in Boiled Cabbage?”

After all this preamble, red cabbage doesn’t in fact smell when you cook it, certainly not when you’ve added two large grated apples, splashes of cider vinegar, lemon and sugar. I could make it sound a lot more tricky than combining those things (along with 125ml water, 2 tablespoons of oil) and one shredded large red cabbage, and steaming the mixture for 20 minutes or until very soft. But I won’t.

It’s a perfect accompaniment to roast meat, but having not yet embarked on the meat sections of Claudia’s book (due to mostly cooking for the household of aforementioned vegans), I can reliably say it’s delicious on its own.