Читать книгу Riverford Farm Cook Book: Tales from the Fields, Recipes from the Kitchen - Jane Baxter - Страница 36

Savoy cabbage is one of my favourite vegetables, yet we dare put it in the boxes only three or four times a year as we encounter such resistance – mainly from customers who are less committed to local, seasonal food. It is a nutritional and culinary tragedy that our traditional greens have been maligned in a national capitulation to the bland, seasonless, overpriced, over-travelled broccoli, peppers and mangetout that have replaced them. The decline may have been started by over-boiled white cabbage and tasteless, uniform varieties of green cabbage but the main culprit is the same fascination with the new and exotic that brought us fondues and prawn cocktails. A couple of generations after Elizabeth David initiated our love affair with Mediterranean food, most people are more comfortable with an aubergine than a cabbage. Last year, however, for the very first time, the calls for more cabbage in the boxes outweighed the moans for less. So maybe the tide is turning. If eaten fresh and not boiled to death, green cabbage and some kales (see Kale) are fantastic vegetables. Never mind the latest exotic or wonder food. You are being taken for a mug. A Savoy or January King cabbage will help you live longer at a fraction of the price. It’s just that they are so cheap, no one has the advertising budget to point this out.

Cabbages, along with kales and greens, belong to the brassica family and originate from the kale-like plants that can still be found growing wild between high tide mark and the cliffs on some of our beaches. Varieties differ in their winter hardiness, making it possible to harvest a good supply of greens for ten months of the year. April and May are the most difficult months, when we sometimes find ourselves arguing with the pigeons over the last remaining greens.