Cabbage Soup

Eastside Road, February 6, 2015—

OUR CHILDREN MARRIED well, all of them. The youngest daughter married a Slav. Most of the people in my family — in Cook's, too, now I think of it — married exogamously. Probably a good thing. Funny thing is, not that many new recipes came into our own family as a result. I suppose this bears looking into: but I'm not about to undertake that research, not at least at this point.

Here's an exception, though: youngest daughter's mother-in-law's soup. Since it's Central European, it features red cabbage. That was an exotic vegetable in my childhood: we all knew, somehow, without ever having been coached in the matter, that cabbage was meant to be green — and yet there were indisputably red cabbages to be found, in the dread Safeway, at rare Imwalle Gardens, even from time to time in our own vegetable patch. Whatever could the Creator have been thinking? Early on a confusion formed, in my mind, between red cabbage and communist vegetables…

A fascinating thing here is the promise that a few slices of a russet potato can replace a roux. Clearly this recipe is for more than a cabbage soup; it is a recipe for improvisation, for spinning away from the text.

In any case it's what we had for dinner tonight, and it was, of course, delicious. There was a bit of bacon in it, but no sausage. It's raining here, for the first time in over a month; it's a little chilly; we've lit a fire for the first time in a couple of weeks. This was the right dinner tonight.

Green salad afterward, to be sure; then an apple and a couple of… what's this… cookies?

Cheap Nero d'Avila

☛Restaurants visited in 2015 are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants