An iconic Indian cabbage dish likely?

On Mumbai's streets there’s a popular new snack called Chinese bhel. There’s still no standard recipe, but all the variants I’ve tried have had one constant: strips of shredded cabbage which are combined with onions, something crunchy and then doused in spicy red sauce. Usually the cabbage is raw, but sometimes it’s lightly fried, the crunchy stuff varies from fried noodles to kurkure and the sauce can be anything from chilli-tomato to ‘Szechuan’ . But the cabbage is constant, and the current popularity of the dish makes me wonder if here we might finally have an iconic Indian cabbage dish.

Of course, the irony is that it’s called ‘Chinese’ , but I think this indicates how India has never entirely embraced the cabbage. It is widely grown, available through most of the year and the basic green type is always cheap, yet we have neither taken to it as we have to its cousin the cauliflower nor, in a slightly different way, to its other exotic cousins like broccoli or bok choy.

The food historian KT Achaya dates the introduction of cabbage to India to around the 1850s, but the lack of impact it’s made on the culinary record is shown by how he simply clubs it along with the entry for cauliflower.

Abroad it’s the opposite: cauliflower is lesser valued, whereas cabbage has vast and varied uses, such as shredded raw in American coleslaw, fermented like German sauerkraut or Korean kimchi, mashed as Irish colcannon, stuffed like Turkish dolma or French chou farci or stuffed into Russian pelmeni, fried with beef for the curiously named British bubble and squeak or cooked into the soup that sustains wide swathes of the world from Portugal to Eastern Europe to all the people on the ‘cabbage soup diet’ .

True, it’s never seen as sophisticated food. MFK Fisher, in her essay The Social Status of a Vegetable, writes about a snobbish old American woman who loathed cabbage after once smelling it cooking in a poorer part of town; she asks: “Is it any wonder that I shudder when I see it or have it near me? Those horrible slums! It’s odour!”

But the sulphurous assault that slow cooked cabbage has on the nose can also mean a deep earthy savouriness on the palate, and its cheapness, hardiness and excellent nutrition values makes it an ideal food for the poor. Cucina povera, as Italians call such cuisine, can mean simple, strong flavoured and deeply satisfying dishes, and cabbage is at the base of many of them. more...