In this new cooking series, Chef Seeto turns to the backyard garden to discover there are many more ways to enjoy some of our everyday fruits and vegetables, turning common produce into culinary delights.
CABBAGE is one of those unsung heroes in the kitchen.
You might not think too much about it, but it can be one of the most versatile veggies in your arsenal. From traditional slaws and salads to Indian-inspired curries and fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchi, there are many ways to enjoy this ancient vegetable.
However it is the medicinal use of cabbage in ancient times that provides some insight into how revered and powerful cabbage was used to once cure all types of diseases and prevent sickness including a weird connection to urine as a farm fertiliser, body cleanser as well as a cheap way to tell if a pregnancy will be a boy or girl! Who would have thought that cabbage had such an impact on the development of early medicine?
A word of warning before you read on; if you are reading today’s story while eating I’d suggest you get that out of the way first. Today’s story of cabbage is weird, at times disgusting, but an extremely fascinating look at why cabbage should be in your regular diet.
History of cabbage
The cabbage family of vegetables is wide and very ancient, and includes the round English cabbage known as gobi in Fiji, as well as savoy, kale, broccoli, cauliflower and the many Chinese cabbage varieties of bok choy, Napa, gai lan and choy sum.
The round cabbages were first domesticated in Europe around 1000BCE or more than 3000 years ago, while the Chinese cabbage varieties are said to have appeared around the 14th century.
Uncooked cabbage is high in glutamine, an amino acid that is essential for intestinal health. It has also been shown to be both antibacterial and antiviral. Cabbage contains vitamin K (essential in the production of blood clotting proteins); potassium (helps regulate blood pressure); and quercetin (antioxidant that is a natural antihistamine that may benefit allergy sufferers).
The Egyptians ate cabbage with vinegar before a night of drinking to prevent hangovers and is still today considered one of the best remedies to cure hangovers by eating cabbage before and after a big night on the town. The Romans also ate cabbage to cure every imaginable ailment under the sun and encouraged people to eat it raw with vinegar before and after each meal.
No matter what the acclaimed cure, it is clear that cabbage’s importance in the diet has long been linked to its medicinal properties.
Power of cabbage
It is long forgotten history but one man — a Roman statesman and avid farmer named Marcus Porcius Cato — is responsible for cabbage’s popularity in ancient medicine after he published a 77-page book for farmers called the “De Agri Cultura” from 165 BCE and not surprisingly, six pages are devoted to the medicinal properties of cabbage. Of all the vegetables of ancient Rome, he declared cabbage as the most medicinal vegetable. Eating it is good for easing digestion, purging the digestive tract, headache, eye-ache, swollen spleen, painful internal organs, sore joints and insomnia he declared.
As a cheap vegetable to grow, the powers of its leaves were recommended for wounds, swellings, sores, boils, tumours, dislocations, bruises and ulcers.
However it is Cato’s promotion of cabbage and link to urine that is weird, disgusting but very intriguing! What was amazing to Cato than the powers of cabbage is the powers of the urine from someone who eats cabbage habitually.
Yes, folks, the urine! Quoting from his ancient text quote: “If you save the urine from a habitual cabbage eater, heat it, and bathe a man in it, you will quickly make him healthy with this cure. This has been tested. Also, if you wash babies with this urine they will never become sickly!”
He goes on to say that bathing the eyes, head, neck, and women’s privates in cabbage-eater-urine is very healthy thing. I love his insistence that he has scientifically tested this seemingly insane idea, but like a lot of traditional medicine from days gone by, there was a lot of trial and error as modern medicine principles developed.
Red cabbage baby test
So, one of the more scientific old wives’ tales from ancient times for gender prediction is the red cabbage test. Long before pregnancy tester kits and ultra scans, the idea behind is that red cabbage juice (made from boiling the chopped cabbage) is a pretty accurate test of pH. Changes in a pregnant woman’s pH in her urine, when mixed with cabbage juice are a rudimentary test of whether the baby is a girl or boy.
So for a fun experiment at home, how does a pregnant mum use this cabbage method?
You get a head of red/purple cabbage, chop it roughly and add enough water to cover it, and boil it for 10 minutes. Take it off heat and go pee in a cup. Draw the blue-violet water out of the cabbage pot and measure it equal to the urine, let it cool, then add it to an identical clear cup. Then add the cabbage water to the urine. Now, you’ll have a new colour water.
A purple colour indicates a girl result and a pink colour (resembling cranberry juice) indicates a boy result. The idea is that if you’re carrying a boy, he will influence the pH of the mother’s pee. If she’s carrying a girl, she can’t influence it the pH, since you’re already a girl.
The Irish and cabbage
We need to go back to the old country of England to understand how cabbage became so entwined with Irish culinary history. Beginning in the 1600s, land laws forced onto the Irish by the English Crown eventually led to a system where mainly British landowners controlled vast tracts of Irish farmland, while mostly poor Irish farmers paid them rent to use the land. The tenant farm system left most farmers with barely enough food to survive on since the majority of the crops they grew went to pay the landowners.
Beginning in the late 17th century, potatoes became their main crop; they provided a high yield so farmers could pay their rents and still have something left over for dinner. Pigs were the main protein for the luckier farmers, but most of the livestock also went to pay the rent. Cabbage was another vegetable these farmers and the rural poor relied on for food, since it was nutrient-dense and grew well in Ireland.
One of the first written accounts of cabbage cultivation comes from the 17th century, but it’s likely the vegetable was being grown in Ireland before this time.
Cabbage became an even more important food staple during the Great Potato Famine. Beginning in 1845, a potato blight that began in Belgium spread across Europe and had devastating effects in Ireland, since the poor there almost completely subsisted on this vegetable. When the blight caused potatoes to begin to rot in fields and in storage bins across the land, many turned to cabbage for sustenance. And they ate a lot.
As the famine continued to rage, eventually killing more than a million people in Ireland over the course of a little more than five years, waves of Irish immigrants began to hit America’s shores. They brought with them their food preferences and recipes from home, including colcannon-potatoes and cabbage boiled and mashed together-and Irish bacon and cabbage.
The king of cabbage, Cato, said that absolutely nothing is healthier that cabbage that has been chopped, washed, dried and served with salt and pepper. If you are feeling up to it, add red wine vinegar and fresh coriander. So, grow and eat more cabbage to get healthy, but please do not really bathe your babies in pee!
* The author is an award-winning celebrity chef, culinary ambassador for Fiji Airways and the “Fiji Grown” campaign, and was honorary culinary adviser to the Fiji Olympic Team.
