One of the Brexit goals was the desire to escape the idiocy of European Union regulations – 26,911 words on the sale of cabbage, for example. Like so many “facts” used in this year’s campaigns, this one was fiction as well. The EU rules of marketing of farm products are 263 words long. Note that the binding British rules are stated in the Assured Produce Standards, sometimes known as the Red Tractor Assurance. Richardson is the author of the organisation’s protocol for cabbage which, he says, has 23,510 words.

Of the 400 or so varieties of cabbage many were originally used as herbal medicines rather than foods. Use is documented in ancient Egypt as well as China (in fact the latter invented Sauerkraut by putting cabbage leaves in rice wine). Pharmacological research today has found cabbage to be the vegetable with the highest number of bioactive substances – containing antioxidants (flavonoids), iron, phosphor and calcium, all boosting the immune system. It is an anti-carcinogen with its high content of sulforaphane and phenol-acids. And cabbage does not just do its magic in raw form – when you cook it, its contents are converted into pure Vitamin C.

 

The smell of boiled cabbage has been historically associated with the dwellings of the poor. Descriptions can be found in many continental novels, probably American ones as well. But I want to quote a different view – from the 1925 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Edna Ferber, So Big, which deconstructs the myth of the American Dream. Her writing was seen as propaganda: a warning not to sacrifice art on the altar of capitalism. Her take on cabbage (as expressed by one of her main characters, a tough farm woman): “But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.”

The German name for Bruxelles Sprouts, by the way, is rose cabbage. It is one of those interesting meals that I hated as a child and now love – just like red beets. Probably the difference between being boiled to death in 1955 and served at Paley’s in 2015….

 

 

 

Van Gogh’s Still Life with Cabbage and Clogs.