The New York Times is currently running good cheap winter recipes (not calling for saffron or a charming little Beaujolais, for instance). My favorite so far has been the cabbage and lentil stew; the only issue I have with it is that it's not much food as written. The smallest cabbage I found was more than twice as much as is called for, and you don't want to cook extra cabbage, because it earns its terrible reputation when overcooked or reheated. However, the lentil part of the recipe is easy to double, and the second half of the cabbage will keep in the fridge for a day or two.
I'm always happy to get a new good cabbage recipe; it's wildly nutritious and cheap, and very good when it isn't awful. A while ago I belonged to a Seattle CSA that sent home a page of recipes for each week's produce, and they had a great cabbage stir-fry recipe that I've lost. "Quick!" was the crux, I think.
There are lots of terrible cabbage recipes in the world, usually boiling it and then trying to amend matters with sour cream or meat. I had hopes of The Rustic Table, ; the whole point is simple cheap nutritious food. There is one cabbage recipe, "Red Cabbage with Apples, Onions, and Caraway"; and it's a very quick stir-fry, so I'm happy enough.
Other than that, The Rustic Table is pretty good with a quirk of our time. The recipes look good and easy to adapt, and they are almost all laid out without requiring a turned page, which I appreciate. The chatty interludes are set in separate boxes, so it's easy to either scan for them or ignore them. The only thing that bothers me is Snow's attitude towards fat and sugar. Some of these recipes have plenty -- perhaps they were feast-recipes for the original peasants, which would be a useful thing to remind us of. Instead there's regular reference to how terrible fattening food is and also to how deadening it is to think about calories all the time. The combination of these two annoys me; I think a food conversation should avoid high-calorie foods, or accept them, but never indulge and kvetch at once.
Looking up cabbage recipes, I also pulled out 's The Old World Kitchen, and my goodness, it's a great cookbook. It would be -- she learned peasant cooking by moving to surviving peasant regions and learning to cook what was there, with the considerable assistance of her baffled neighbors (at the end of a hog-butchering day: "Please forgive me, but did your mother teach you nothing at all?") Even the redoubtable Luard only has a few cabbage recipes -- five or six, perhaps -- but one of them calls for fifty pounds of cabbage at once.
In the introduction, she remarks "Sometimes I have included or rejected a dish on grounds of taste -- my children in particular found that they were testers for more than enough northern cabbage recipes, and pleaded for a week or two on the sweet vegetables of Provence." This is a bit guarded; did Luard herself disdain the cabbage? Or only her tender children?
Saurkraut tomorrow, I think. And I have to admit that I think the Times' cabbage recipe is even better with a thread of saffron and a dash of red wine.
Find in a library: The Rustic Table
Find in a library: The Old-World Kitchen
P.S. -- I am an American. It is a credo of my cuisine that anything good can be put on pizza. And yet... I can imagine a crisp rye crust, and roasted apples, and one of the sweeter saurkrauts; it might be good, it could fit the physical parameters of pizza, but it would clearly be not a pizza but an unzipped pierogi.
So wrote clew in Cookery.