Cabbage

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.

The old herbalists treated the cabbage as a cooling, moistening plant, and its long association with sobriety and plain sustenance gave it a symbolism of homeliness, thrift and the domestic hearth rather than of any high mystery. In folk speech a cabbage stood for the ordinary and unglamorous, and children in several European countries were told they were found under a cabbage. Its genuine importance is agricultural and dietary, a single wild coastal species bred into cabbage, kale, cauliflower, broccoli, sprouts and kohlrabi, one of the most productive transformations in the history of cultivation.

In Scotland and Ireland cabbage played a part in Halloween divination: young people pulled the first cabbage stalk they found while blindfolded, and the size, shape and taste of the stalk, along with how much earth clung to its root, was read as a sign of a future spouse's character and fortune, a custom recorded by Robert Burns in his poem Halloween. This playful divination sits oddly beside the vegetable's reputation for plainness, a reminder that even the homeliest kitchen plant accumulated its own small body of folk magic alongside its long record of feeding the poor.

The word cabbage itself descends from the same root as cole, seen today in coleslaw, literally cabbage salad, from the Dutch koolsla, a small etymological trace of the vegetable's long history in the everyday language of eating rather than in myth.