Cabbage Family

Cabbages are hardly the most glamorous of vegetables. At best, they seem worthy but dull; at worst -boiled to death, like the infamous school-dinners cabbage – they are coarse, sulphurous and indigestible. Yet there’s more to the ancient and plentiful brassica family than meets the eye. Cabbages have been cultivated at least since Roman times and are astonishingly diverse: from the smooth, pale common or Dutch cabbage to the handsome, ruffled Savoy, crisp, curly-leaved kale, tiny Brussels sprouts and beautiful, burnished red cabbage. Then there are the exotic cousins from the Far East: pale-stemmed pak choi, crisp and delicate Chinese cabbage and the pretty, flowering choi sum and Chinese broccoli. Cauliflower and broccoli are brassicas, too, though rather more dainty in form, their heads made up of hundreds of tiny flower buds. Perhaps the most unlikely member of the family is kohlrabi, a swollen stem that resembles a turnip rather than a cabbage.