By Joel Denker
The Romans revered it. “Cabbage is a vegetable that surpasses all others,” the Roman statesman Cato, wrote. An opinion that would jolt many of us today who either ignore cabbage altogether or dismiss it as a lowly vegetable.
Enjoy them raw dipped in vinegar, Cato urged his readers. They also help with digestion, he added. Cato preached that eating the leaves would prevent the ills of excessive eating and drinking. “If you wish at a dinner party to drink a good deal and to dine freely, before the feast eat as much raw cabbage with vinegar as you wish, and likewise after you have feasted, eat about five leaves. It will make you as if you had eaten nothing and you shall drink as much as you please.”
Cabbage was also curative. “Put crushed cabbage leaf on all wounds and tumors,” Cato advised. “It will cure all these sores and make them well without pain.”
The vegetable the Roman extolled was not the modern cabbage. The large leafy plants, more like kales and collards, were headless. The Latin name of the curly leafed kale and its sister, the smoother leafed collard, means “cabbage of the vegetable garden without a head.”
In later years, the cabbage lost some of its lustre. The Roman satirist Juvenal scoffed at the poor man supping on his “nauseous dish” of cabbage while his patron devoured “excellent fish” garnished with olives. Lucullus, a government official, argued that the vegetable was ill suited for gentlemen.
The Roman invaders brought the large leafed cabbage to Britain. Migrating through Europe, it was transported by merchants, sailors, and armies, and it soon sprouted in monastic gardens. In northern and central Europe, the hardy plant thrived better than any other vegetable in the chilly climate.
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To learn more about cabbage, see The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, coming in October from Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442248861/The-Carrot-Purple-and-Other-Curious-Stories-of-the-Food-We-Eat.
