Once A Young Man

Never Put Cabbage in the Soup

By Jeff Jordan  

If you ask my wife, she will tell you I don’t like vegetables.  I maintain that I am simply “fussy” about my vegetable consumption.  Like the elder George Bush, I don’t like broccoli, and actually, that in itself that is not entirely true:  broccoli is one of those vegetables that should not, under any circumstances, be cooked.  Steamed corn, green beans, and peas in their pods are marvelous, and I will eat them by the pound, even⎯and I can hear the howls of denial⎯if they are not drenched in oil or butter.  Sautéed vegetables such as onions, peppers, asparagus, and even zucchini are some of my favorites.  

I do like raw broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage.  Yes, take those little florets of broccoli or cauliflower and drop them on a leafy salad as a crunchy replacement for nuts, swish them through a dip for hand food, mix them with other veggies in an oil- or mayo-based dressing for a cold salad, or pop them in your mouth straight out of the refrigerator for a snack instead of popcorn.  

But do not put them on pizza, omelets, stir-fry, casserole, or anyplace where they are cooked.  Why?  Because they taste awful, that’s why.  “But Jeff,” you say, “that’s a personal opinion; not everyone feels that way.”

Consider this.  Take a couple of fresh eggs.  Whip them with a dollop of sour cream.  Chop a sweet onion, some honey-baked ham, and sweet pepper of your choice, and sauté them in some sweet cream butter.  Whip in the egg mixture and finish your omelet.  Served with two pieces of buttered sourdough bread toasted, and you’ll have one foot on the stairway to heaven.  

Rewind and insert broccoli florets for the peppers.  In the first recipe, the flavors from all of the ingredients blend subtly to make a new and delightful taste.  The texture and sweetness of the onions and peppers, the smoked salty taste of the ham, the creamy butter, the light froth of the perfectly raised omelet, and the tang of the sour cream combine for a magnificent way to start your day or enjoy your lunch.  When you substitute the broccoli for the peppers, all you taste is the broccoli.  Cooked broccoli is acid and smelly.  

No! No!  Do not fall under the spell of the diet nuts who discovered broccoli as a cure-all for everything that needs substance and texture to make it appetizing.  If you want to make a diet omelet, use egg and butter substitutes or no butter in a non-stick pan.  If you like sautéed broccoli, skip the onions, peppers, ham, and a dollop of sour cream, because you won’t taste them anyway.  The eggs will hold the broccoli florets together and make them easier to pick up with a fork; otherwise, the eggs are pretty much there just for effect.  The above caution holds for all recipes that call for heating broccoli in any way other than bringing it to room temperature.  

I would apply the same caution to cauliflower and cabbage.  I can think of no better way to spoil a good soup than to put cabbage in it.  I like sauerkraut, but this involves a pickling process and does not involve cooking the raw product.  The only way warm cabbage tastes good is if it has been pickled into sauerkraut and put between slices of toasted bread with thinly sliced corned beef and mustard or spooned into a bun with the sausage of your choice.  Celestial!

I maintain that if you put cabbage in soup, cabbage is all you will taste.  

Evidently, however, there is a large group of people who disagree.  If you Google “cabbage soup,” you will find many websites touting the Cabbage Soup Diet.  Supposedly by following their recipes, you can survive exclusively on various permutations of cabbage soup and actually lose weight.  I would argue that any weight loss will result from not eating rather than having cabbage soup for breakfast and your mid-afternoon snack.

Let’s get past what the cabbage-soup lover and his domicile smell like after he has spent hours boiling the offending vegetable.  I will stipulate that my coffee breath may be as abhorrent as his cabbage smell. Still, considering the mental gymnastics needed to convince yourself that cabbage boiled with a healthy collection of beans, corn, and legumes tastes any different from cabbage boiled all by itself, that kind of denial can obviously be epidemic.  I know that if I were to delude myself so seriously, I would need a twelve-step program to get back to normal.

Ah, Saturday night dinner (without leftovers):  vegetable soup with the noxious smell of cabbage wafting up my nostrils as I try to get past the appetizer of two grilled tortillas stuffed with jack cheese and broccoli.  For the main dish, we are having soufflé with—you guessed it—broccoli, and our side dish is a vegetable medley of cauliflower, carrots, and eggplant.  Now, this is the first step on the road to hell.

I actually wrote this a couple of years ago, but there is this lingering misunderstanding about my like or dislike of vegetables. So I thought a look back might be helpful.