A Slow Baked Weekend
This weekend I baked one of my favourite dishes for Sunday lunch, and one which I constantly call my “surprisingly good recipe”: Stuffed Cabbage in the Troo Style, which I found in Tamasin Day-Lewis’s Good Tempered Food, but is in fact a Jane Grigson recipe.
There exists a special alchemy between sausages and cabbage. Served apart, they are delicious, but when cooked together, the co-mingling of the strong, definite flavours produces something truly sublime.
Europeans have long known the brilliant simplicity of using as few ingredients as possible in their cuisine. Not only does this spring out of frugality but from the sheer knowledge of the flavours.
Whilst some of us are lucky enough to be seemingly born with that knowledge of ingredients, it can also be learned through time and tasting. This gathered experience warns us that certain foods are not good together. For example, cheese is rarely served with fish, beef isn’t generally served in a white wine sauce and ketchup isn’t poured over a roast dinner. However, there are always exceptions to every rule and it is wonderful to find an obscure taste sensation in the most unlikely place, the most recent of which might be salted caramels.
Even people with the most jaded taste-buds will know that some foods just belong together: cheese and tomato, chocolate and hazelnut, cabbage and sausage.
I know, the coupling of sausage and cabbage could sound like a nightmare school dinner. Washed out flabby cabbage with gristly, synthetic pink sausages that are more water and sawdust than anything resembling pork are the things bad childhood meals are made of. But imagine this! Crisp Savoy cabbage, dark green and rich in iron, combined with artisanal vegan sausages that are now so easy to find in any supermarket, accessorised with a blanket – no, pashmina – of sliced potatoes, then slow baked.
Served with nothing more than some crusty bread or, if you omit the sliced potatoes, delicious with mashed potato too, with the porky, cabbagy cooking liquor that has congregated at the bottom of the dish poured over the top. Of course, I would keep BOTH types of potatoes! Full recipe over on the blog here, this is an easy, all-in-one dish guaranteed to satisfy that intrinsic need for comfort food. Thank heavens for the always reliable Jane Grigson with her wealth of knowledge and non-fussy dishes. This recipe comes from her indispensable Vegetable Book.