Cabbage

Cabbage has a history that is actually longer than that of the potato. We have been eating it in Britain since the time of the Celts, and it was an early pottage vegetable. What we had been eating, though, was a tough, wild variety that apparently is still grown in Europe and northern Britain around the sea coasts. This was very different from the more tender cabbages we now know. It was very bitter and consequently had a bad reputation. (The bitter plant was eaten for medicinal purposes, especially while drinking – it was said to prevent you from becoming drunk.) It took the Romans to develop the plant, taking away some of that bitterness, but the vegetable was still an open-leaved kale variety, not a tight-packed ball such as we see today. It wasn’t until centuries later that European gardeners mastered the art of cabbage-growing. From the Dutch came the white cabbage (and coleslaw). A late seventeenth-century gardener’s book was quoted in Food in England by Dorothy Hartley: ”Tis scarce 100 years since we had Cabbages out of Holland, Sir Arthur Ashley of Wilburg St Giles, in Dorsetshire, being the first who planted them in England. Cabbage is not so greatly magnified by the rest of the doctors, as affording but a gross and melancholy juice. Yet loosening, if moderately boil’d. It is seldom eaten raw, except by the Dutch.’ From the kingdom of Savoy (now part of France) came the Savoy cabbage, probably the most common variety in Britain today.