The Plain Vegetable the Romans Revered

The cabbage, Brassica oleracea in its many cultivated forms, is one of the oldest of European vegetables, and it held a place in Roman esteem out of all proportion to its humble modern reputation. Cato the Elder devoted long passages of his treatise on farming to the cabbage, calling it the first of all vegetables and crediting it with keeping the household in health; the Romans ate it before a banquet in the belief that it staved off drunkenness and cleared the head afterward, a folk conviction recorded here as history rather than as fact. Its dense, layered head and reliable hardiness made it the staple green of the poor across the old world.

Cabbage's preserved form, fermented as sauerkraut in Germany and much of northern Europe, had a genuine and well-documented role in the history of seafaring health: the British explorer James Cook stocked large quantities of sauerkraut on his Pacific voyages in the 1770s, and the near-absence of scurvy among his crew, at a time when the disease routinely killed sailors on long ocean passages, is credited in large part to the vitamin C the fermented cabbage preserved, a genuine nutritional discovery reached well before vitamins themselves were understood or named.