Can you cure COVID with cabbage? I dunno, but this impromptu Asian slaw came out pretty good.
The other day I needed something healthy and crunchy to go with the last of my Instant Pot Thai Roast Pork. So I pulled a half head of cabbage out of the refrigerator, shredded it on the coarsest side of the box grater, added a little ginger and garlic, some chopped jalapeños for heat and carrots for color, then mixed up a dressing with 1 T cider vinegar (couldn’t find the rice vinegar), 1 T fish sauce, 1 T toasted sesame oil, 2 T neutral oil and salt and white pepper to taste. It was delicious and would have been even better if I could have let it mellow a couple of hours but one of my quarantine cohorts had eaten it by then.
A couple days earlier I was cooking Chinese and made some Hand-Torn Sichuan Cabbage with the first half of that head. I should add that these dishes provide almost instant satisfaction through their ease of preparation, though in most cases they get better with age. And have I mentioned sauerkraut?
My point is this. You’ve got enough on your plate to also have to worry about salad greens wilting or not getting enough roughage in your diet. Just eat cabbage with every meal!
As we mentioned way back in 2012, cabbage is a miracle foodstuff in its versatility and adaptability. “Here is a vegetable that is cheap, available everywhere year round, and prevents cancer. What more could you want, for God’s sake? You don’t even have to wash it; just peel away the top layer and you’re good to go.” Can you cure COVID with cabbage? I don’t see why not.
Over the years our love of cabbage has only grown more profound, as you can discover by doing a search for “cabbage” and “cole slaw” in the sidebar. We like to stock up at St. Patrick’s day when it’s on sale, and a head will be good for a couple of months once you remove the outer leaves, but even at a regular price of a buck a pound or so it’s far more economical than salad greens.
We’ll close with the analogy to the friendly character called the Schmoo, in the classic L’il Abner comic strip, which we cited in the earlier post. To quote Wikipedia, “Shmoos are delicious to eat, and are eager to be eaten. If a human looks at one hungrily, it will happily immolate itself—either by jumping into a frying pan, after which they taste like chicken, or into a broiling pan, after which they taste like steak. When roasted they taste like pork, and when baked they taste like catfish. (Raw, they taste like oysters on the half-shell.)”
Shmoos are imaginary, but cabbage is almost as good and it’s real.
Remember that cauliflower, Brussels Sprouts, Broccoli, and are merely different cabbage hybrids. The best sauce to keep in my kitchen is toasted sesame oil. It is not a cooking oil but it adds a burst of flavor. I remember Shmoos, they were tasty and nutritious, if you could find one in the wild. I shop at the 99 Ranch Market in Irvine, the big Asian grocery chain out here. They have at least a dozen “cabbages” that do not look anything like our American style cabbage. I have six or seven that I enjoy. What I enjoy most is the bitter Chinese cabbages, they are great stir fried and a place a dollop of toasted sesame oil to seal the flavor. American style cabbage is bland in comparison.
Absolutely all crucifers will cure COVID at least as well as cabbage. I don’t buy Chinese cabbage because it is much more expensive but if cost is not an issue I would recommend it. As to sesame oil, I’ve been appreciating a number of recipes from the deep south featuring benne–the West African name for sesame seeds–foods introduced to the new world by slaves. There is nothing good to say about that scenario except that these new-to-us ingredients made it into our footways.