by Rebecca Rupp
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Achard promised outflows of tobacco, molasses, rum, coffee, vinegar, and beer, all from the miraculous beet.
The sickish white, on the other hand, was viewed more positively by European chemists who, in the eighteenth century, were in the process of developing the sugar beet. In 1747 German chemist Andreas Marggraf found that white beetroots contained sucrose, the same profitably sweet ingredient produced by sugarcane. Subsequently Marggraf’s student Franz Achard instituted a program to improve the sugar potential of the existing beet crop and devised an industrial process for efficiently extracting sugar from beets — a scientific accomplishment that overexcited him to the point of promising future outflows of tobacco, molasses, rum, coffee, vinegar, and beer, all from the miraculous beet.
The King of Prussia, who took much of this hype with a grain of salt, still offered Achard a subsidy to establish a sugar beet industry, and the first processing plant was constructed at Kunern, Silesia, in 1801. The beets processed were Silesian fodder beets, which contained up to 6.2 percent sugar, as opposed to the relatively measly 2 percent sugar content of the run-of-the-mill garden beet.
Over the next decade, the sugar beet industry soared in importance, notably in France, where Napoleonic warmongering and the resultant British blockade of French seaports had cut off the French supply of West Indian cane sugar. In the ensuing scramble for sweeteners, factories manufactured syrups from everything from raisins to honey — distressingly unsatisfactory substitutes for table sugar — until pharmacist Nicolas Deyeux, who seems to have kept current with the scientific literature, proposed using Achard’s sugar beet. The first imperial French sugar beet factory was established in 1812, three years before the imperial French government went under at the Battle of Waterloo.
Today sugarcane and sugar beets together account for most of the world’s sugar, with a little help from corn and sorghum, sugar maples, and honeybees. The modern improved sugar beet, B. vulgaris var. saccharifera, contains an impressive 20 percent sucrose by weight and is now in sixth place on the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s list of the world’s major crops. (Number one is sugarcane.)
The eighteenth century also saw the introduction of the mangel-wurzel, like the sugar beet an offshoot of the earlier white fodder beet. It was developed in Germany and Holland as a livestock feed and introduced to England in the 1770s, where an unfortunate mistranslation of the German Mangold-Wurzel (“beet root”) as mangel-wurzel (“scarcity root”) fostered the belief that these beets would make a dandy food for the poor in periods of famine.
They were better suited to cows. Martha Washington experimented with them at Mount Vernon, and by 1888 W. Atlee Burpee’s Farm Annual offered customers seven different types of mangels, including the Golden Tankard, which in the illustration looks like a gallon jug with a ridiculously undersized topknot of leaves. Cows fed on it, says Mr. Burpee, give higher-priced milk.
The Farm Annual also offers twelve varieties of garden beets and a lone cultivar of chard, the stems and midribs of which, the accompanying description explains, can be either cooked “like Asparagus” or pickled.
All are, of course, delicious.
And they taste, just a little bit, like good garden dirt.
CHAPTER FOUR
In Which
CABBAGE
CONFOUNDS
DIOGENES
plus
Robert Burton’s Black Vapours,
Samuel Pepys’s Dismal Dinner,
Captain Cook’s Sauerkraut,
A Roman Broccoli Binge, and
The Vegetable Variation of
Johann Sebastian Bach
Oh thrice and four times happy those who plant cabbages!
FRANÇOIS RABELAIS
The original ancestor of the edible cabbage was a seaside dweller, a native of the Mediterranean and the northern European coast. Some cabbage students believe it was sea kale, a tough, bitter, loose-leafed plant still found growing wild along the temperate seaboard; others believe that the modern cultivated cabbage is a multifaceted mongrel, with combined genetic input from a number of assorted — and now impossible to sort out — wild relatives. Whatever the case, as of the present day some prolific great-granddaddy Brassica oleracea has spawned kale, kohlrabi, head cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts, plus the phenomenal ten- to fifteen-foot-tall tree cabbage, stalks of which once served as rafters to support the thatched roofs of cottages in the Channel Islands.
The cultivated cabbage has been around for thousands of years. The Greeks ate it and the Romans positively doted on it. The Romans claimed that their prized cabbages originated from the sweat of Jupiter, shed while attempting to explain away the rival pronouncements of a pair of opposing oracles, a plight with which any parent of two or more children can sympathize. An alternative and less pleasant tale involves Lycurgus, king of the Edonians, who banned the cult of the wine god Dionysus and, wielding an ox goad, imprisoned the Bacchae, the god’s drunken followers. In revenge, Dionysus drove Lycurgus mad, which caused the king to chop his son to pieces, thinking the boy was a grapevine. The outraged Edonians then had their king torn apart by wild horses. Bereaved and awaiting his unspeakable punishment, he wept, and his tears became cabbages.
Roman soldier and statesman Cato the Elder, whose De Agri Cultura (On Agriculture) dates to the second century BCE and is the oldest surviving book of ancient Latin prose, waxed ecstatic over the cabbage, to which he attributed his formidable health and longevity. (He lived well into his eighties, reportedly fathering twenty-eight sons.) Others were less enthusiastic. One story holds that the fourth-century BCE Greek philosopher Diogenes — famed for wandering about with a lantern, vainly searching for an honest man — once remarked to a pleasure-loving young friend, known for sucking up to the rich, “If you lived on cabbage, you would not be obliged to flatter the powerful.” The young man promptly replied, “If you flattered the powerful, you would not be obliged to live on cabbage.”
The author of Apicius (De Re Coquinaria), whose tastes were usually fancier, listed at least five different ways of preparing cabbage, variously accompanied by cumin seed, mint, coriander, raisins, wine, leeks, almond flour, and green olives; and the Emperor Claudius, the story goes, once convoked the Senate to vote on whether corned beef and cabbage was the best of all possible dinner dishes. The senators, no fools, voted a unanimous yes.
Medicinally, cabbage eating was said to prevent drunkenness or at least to alleviate hangovers, both recurrent Roman problems; it was also the vegetable of choice for curing colic, paralysis, and the plague. Pliny the Elder, who lists eighty-seven remedies involving cultivated cabbages, recommends it as a palliative for everything from gout to hiccups to shrew-mouse bites, and claims that a child, washed in the urine of a cabbage eater, will “never be weak or puny.” He also points out dampen-ingly that cabbage, eaten, makes the breath smell.
The earliest of cultivated cabbages was almost certainly kale, B. oleracea var. acephala, a curly-leaved nonheading cabbage akin to the American Southern favorite, collard greens. The thick leaves branch from fibrous stalks, which, according to Irish legend, the fairies ride for horses on moonlit nights. Kale arrived early in colonial America and was firmly established by the late eighteenth century, when an advertisement for “Dutch kale of various Colours; Scotch ditto” appeared in the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Daily Advertiser.
“Scotch ditto” seems an offhand tribute to the top kale consumers of Europe. “To be off one’s kale” is the Scottish equivalent of “to be off one’s food,” and in Scotland, a “kaleyard” is what anyone else would call a kitchen garden. Scotland’s kale broth is one of the few survivors of traditional kale cuisine, a school of cookery that admittedly was never extensive, even at its peak.
Historically, kale has been a more popular food for livestock than for people, though for both it is notably nutritious, rich in calcium and vitamins K, A, and C. It’s also a rich source of antioxidants, containing a hef
ty 1,770 ORAC units per 100 grams, twice as much as Brussels sprouts, broccoli, or beets.
The Romans may have had kohlrabi. Pliny describes “a Brassica in which the stem is thin just above the roots, but swells out in the region that bears the leaves, which are few and slender” — which certainly sounds like kohlrabi, though at least one latter-day interpreter thinks he was talking about cauliflower. Kohlrabi is sometimes called cabbage turnip or turnip-rooted cabbage because of its turniplike shape, but the more anatomically correct nickname is stem cabbage, since the edible portion is actually an aboveground swelling of the stem, modified for starch storage. The official scientific name is the tongue-twisting B. oleracea var. gongylodes sub-var. caulorapa.
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Cabbage and Co.
The cabbage, Brassica oleracea, is a member of Brassicaceae, the Cabbage or Mustard family, along with such other edible goodies as rutabagas, radishes, horseradish, watercress, true mustard, and wasabi. The family itself contains some 330 genera and nearly 4000 species. Distant cabbage cousins include such unlikely cabbagoids as candytuft and indigo.
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Charlemagne ordered kohlrabi to be planted in his domains but fed it only to cattle, under the urgings of the royal physician, who warned that it would turn his soldiers unaggressively bovine. Kohlrabi is fairly bland in flavor — Alice B. Toklas of the notorious marijuana-laden brownies (actually “Hashish Fudge”) ascribed to it “the pungency of the high-born radish bred in a low-brow cucumber” — and it has traditionally been best liked on the dinner tables of Germany and Eastern Europe. It never made much culinary headway in America, where nineteenth-century seed catalogs usually carried it with the proviso that if the family spurned it, it would do just fine as livestock feed. W. Atlee Burpee, in 1888, offered three cultivars, green, white, and purple, and had little to say about any of them.
Heading cabbages, B. oleracea var. capitata, the solid balls that, chopped, dominate New England boiled dinner, were known to Pliny, who mentions heads measuring a foot across. When Julius Caesar’s troops invaded Britain they brought it along, in two colors, red and green.
In heading cabbage, the leaves are larger and thicker than those of nonheading varieties and are tightly wrapped around an enlarged terminal bud on a truncated stem. The result is about the size and shape of a human head: the scientific name capitata thus comes from the Latin caput, “head,” as in capitalist and decapitate. The common name cabbage similarly comes from the Old French word for head, caboche. Attractive as cabbage heads are, being called one is not a compliment: according to lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner, “cabbagehead” has meant a perfect idiot since 1682.
By the late sixteenth century, John Gerard in his Great Herball (under “Of Coleworts”) lists sixteen different kinds of cabbages in cultivation, among them the “open coles” (kales and collards), “curled savoys” (broccoli), and “collie flours,” and credits them with a host of medicinal virtues, including the ability to clear the complexion and cure deafness. He warns vineyard owners off them, however, since cabbages reputedly killed grapevines.
Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), cautioned depressives to keep away from cabbages: “Amongst herbs to be eaten I find gourds, cowcumbers, coleworts, melons disallowed, but especially cabbage. It causeth trouble-some dreams and sends up black vapours to the brain.” And Samuel Pepys was simply disappointed in them. His diary entry for Sunday, March 10, 1660, records dismally, “Dined at home on a poor Lenten dinner of coleworts and bacon” — after which things didn’t get much better, since in the afternoon he went to church and the sermon was dull.
“Cabbage causeth trouble-some dreams and sends up black vapours to the brain.”
Not everyone, however, regarded cabbages as negatively as did Burton and Pepys. In fact, the early English cabbage is boastfully commemorated in stone on the 1627 tomb of Sir Anthony Ashley in Wimborne St. Giles, Dorset. Sir Anthony lies in effigy with an impressive cabbage at his feet, though no one these days is sure just why; the legend that he was the first cabbage planter in England is certainly wrong. One food historian has suggested that perhaps he made some useful improvement in the existing cabbage breeds.
If so, Ashley’s improved cabbage may have eventually reached the American colonies — though not with the first lot of transatlantic cabbages, which were planted in Canada in the 1540s by French explorer Jacques Cartier. John Winthrop, Jr., setting out to join his father in Massachusetts Bay in 1631, packed a chest of garden seeds, along with “bookes and cloth,” gunpowder and butter, and leather, rope, and ironware. His seed list (“Bought of Robert Hill Grocer dwelling at the three Angells in lumber streete”) is an excellent indication of what was planted in the early colonial garden. Included are seeds of “Cabedg,” “Colewort” (probably kale), and “Culiflower.” This last was the most expensive item on young John’s list: while most of his picks cost pennies, he forked over five shillings for two ounces of cauliflower seed.
Over the course of the next century, cabbages, gamely multiplying, became a staple of the American garden and table. By the mid-eighteenth century, garden writer and designer Batty Langley announced that “to make an Attempt of informing Mankind what a Cabbage, Savoy, or Colly-flower is, would be both a ridiculous and simple Thing, seeing that every Person living are perfectly acquainted therewith . . .” Among those perfectly acquainted was the indefatigable Thomas Jefferson, who grew eighteen varieties at Monticello. Frequently mentioned in his records are drumhead cabbages, which had flattened tops reminiscent of the percussion instrument, and the darkly ruffled Savoys, which Jefferson described in glowingly classical terms as having a “wrinkled jade green head with a surface like crackled faience.” It was their resemblance to the Savoy that led flower-growers to dub the old-fashioned damask roses “cabbage roses.”
W. Atlee Burpee’s seed company was essentially founded on a cabbage, the Surehead, introduced to American gardeners in 1877. Response was enthusiastic: R. McCrone of Sykesville, Maryland, said his Sureheads were as large as water buckets; Seth Fish of Monmouth, Maine, called them “the finest sight on my farm”; J. M. Carroll of Springville, Alabama, said modestly that his gave entire satisfaction; and S. C. Stratton of Leetonia, Ohio, who wrote that “The Surehead Cabbage cannot be beat,” boasted that his weighed thirty-five pounds apiece. By 1888, Burpee was offering thirty-one cabbage cultivars in addition to the Surehead, as opposed to one each of “Brocoli” (in purple) and Brussels sprouts.
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The Self-Cleaning Cabbage
Biomimetics is the science of snatching good ideas from nature, which people have been doing ever since we started draping ourselves in sabertooth-tiger fur. Velcro (from burdock burrs), sticky tape (from gecko toes), and the sharkskin-style swimsuits worn by Olympic swimmers are all human exploitations of designs that nature thought up first. Water- and dirt-repellent protective sprays like Scotchgard were inspired by the cleanliness-conscious cabbage.
When scrutinized under an electron microscope, cabbage leaves prove to be covered with minuscule lumps and bumps, which in turn are coated with tiny water-shedding wax crystals. Water, poured on a cabbage, simply rolls down the surface of these waxy bumps, collecting grime as it goes, which is why cabbage leaves are so sparklingly clean after a rain.
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Abraham Lincoln, a cabbage lover, demanded and got corned beef and cabbage for his inaugural dinner in 1861, but by the late nineteenth century, the culinary cabbage had been banished from polite tables. Food writer M. F. K. Fisher, in Serve It Forth (1937), describes an acquaintance’s encounter with a dish of cabbage at a little Swiss restaurant. “‘What — what is that beautiful food?’ Mrs. Davidson demanded. . . . At the word spinach her face clouded, but when I mentioned cabbage a look of complete and horrified disgust settled like a cloud.”
The turn-of-the-century cabbage had hit social rock bottom. It was peasant food, served forth on the tables of the poor and the vulgar, the sort of people who kept pigs i
n the parlor. Its fall from favor was largely the fault of cabbage b.o., the penetratingly unpleasant smell generated by cabbage cooking. Mrs. Davidson, encountering it for the first time, describes how she staggered, gasping, down the street, pressing her muff to her face. Then realization dawned.
“‘Oh!’ I cried. ‘Oh, we’re in the slums!’”
The odoriferous culprits in simmering cabbage are sulfur-containing compounds, volatile by-products of mustard oil and isothiocyanates. When heated, these normal constituents of cabbage break down and release repellent vapors of ammonia, methyl sulfide, mercaptans, which smell of skunk, and hydrogen sulfide, which smells of rotten eggs.
For the garden cabbage plant, the noxious mustard oils are the vegetable equivalent of heavy artillery. As defensive chemicals, they act to repel cabbage-eating pests. In undisturbed cabbage tissue, the oils are bound to sugar molecules and, as mustard oil glycosides, are peacefully benign. When the cells are broken, however, as by predatory nibbling insects, enzymes clip off the restraining sugars and release the burning oils. These oils are devastating to bugs. Relatively low-key in cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower, higher concentrations of mustard oils put the pepper in radishes, the spice in hot-dog mustard, and the explosive burn in horseradish and wasabi.
