Brussels sprouts are played out. Kale was a mistake. This winter, embrace cabbage. Affordable, delicious, and astoundingly versatile, it has much more to offer than its reputation suggests.
It is a cliché of food writing to refer to a vegetable as “humble”—the humble carrot, the humble potato—but in the case of cabbage, the cliché is apt. Mark Twain wrote that “cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” Lewis Carroll’s walrus and carpenter discuss topics so unalike from one another that they talk of “cabbages—and kings.” Cabbage, a staple of peasant cuisine across Eurasia, is not merely humble, but the very symbol of humility.
Two thousand years before Twain considered the subject, however, Cato the Elder offered a different view. “Brassica est quae omnibus holeribus antistat,” he wrote: “The cabbage surpasses all other vegetables.” Setting aside the specifics of his argument, which to modern ears will sound oddly focused on the urine of cabbage-eaters, the overall sentiment is spot on.
By weight, cabbage is among the cheapest foods you can buy. (For simplicity’s sake, I’m focusing exclusively on standard-issue green cabbage, and not other wonderful varieties such as savoy and napa.) A USDA database ranked 93 different vegetable categories by price as of 2022. Green cabbage came in at No. 93. Because it is so dense, a single head produces an astonishing amount of food. It lasts in the refrigerator almost indefinitely, long past the point when kale begins to stink and carrots go limp. And it is almost impossible to overcook.
Cabbage lends itself to endless preparations. This is a good thing, because if you buy one average-sized head, you will have to figure out how to use it all. You can roast, grill, or pan-sear it. This will produce something with a meaty texture and rich, nutty flavor. You can turn it into cole slaw, which is fabulous on a leftover-turkey sandwich, or go in a more vinegar-based direction and call it a cabbage salad. It’s great sautéed or stir-fried, or braised until practically melting in the bottom of a pan underneath a roasting chicken or Thanksgiving turkey.
Despite its many virtues, cabbage has yet to inspire the kind of enthusiasm directed at some other members of the Brassica oleracea species, including kale, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower, which collectively have been on an astounding culinary trajectory over the past three decades. (Yes, they are all the same species, a bit like how Great Danes and dachshunds are both Canis familiaris.) These plants, also known as cruciferous vegetables, were long synonymous with healthy but unappetizing food that kids must be forced to eat. During one challenge to the Affordable Care Act at the Supreme Court, much of the oral argument turned on the hypothetical question of whether Congress could pass a law requiring Americans to eat broccoli.
If the idea of a “broccoli mandate” now doesn’t seem like such a threat to liberty—if cruciferous vegetables have become less menacing—it’s largely because America has gotten better at cooking them. When I was a kid, in the 1990s, the dominant way to prepare them was steaming or, worse still, boiling. So backwards was the national approach to veggies at the time that a 1993 New York Times article by Florence Fabricant reads like a dispatch from another planet. In the essay, Fabricant alerted readers to a new and unfamiliar culinary trend: roasting. Chefs in fancy restaurants, she wrote, were beginning to use the technique not just for big cuts of meat but for other foods, including vegetables. “Instead of boiling beets or carrots,” Fabricant suggested, readers should “try roasting these foods.” Over time, home cooks would heed the call. Cooking veggies with high heat, oil, and salt turned out to work wonders for both flavor and texture. Many of my Atlantic colleagues report that their young kids happily eat roasted broccoli.
This century, several breeds of Brassica oleracea have taken their turn as the “it” vegetable. In the early 2010s, thanks in part to endorsements from such celebrity proto-influencers as Gwyneth Paltrow and Beyoncé, kale went from obscurity to sudden ubiquity. Bon Appétit declared kale the trendiest vegetable of 2012 and named one Brooklyn restaurant’s kale salad its dish of the year. Unless expertly prepared, kale salad tastes like something you might use to insulate the walls of your house, a fact that only bolstered its claim to “superfood” status. Surely something so palpably fibrous must have borderline medicinal properties.
Cauliflower followed not long after, less as a superfood than as a toothsome shape-shifter. The Atlantic contributing writer Rachel Sugar observed in 2018 that Twain’s college-educated crucifer had begun appearing as a meatless, grain-free stand-in for all sorts of other foods. Suddenly you could buy cauliflower-crust pizza in the frozen-food aisle and order fried Buffalo cauliflower bites at the sports bar.
But no crucifer’s rise has been as stunning and total as that of Brussels sprouts. “What’s the difference between Brussels sprouts and boogers?” a joke from my childhood began. “Kids don’t eat Brussels sprouts.” Two things made the vegetable’s subsequent reputational reversal possible. First, in the 1990s, a Dutch scientist identified the chemical compounds that made it bitter. This allowed growers to gradually breed versions of Brussels sprouts with less and less of those compounds. However you cook them, modern Brussels sprouts taste better than they used to.
Second, chefs started doing something that now seems obvious but at the time was novel: serving charred Brussels sprouts with bacon. David Chang’s Manhattan restaurant Momofuku is widely credited with starting the trend, in 2004. Now you can order crispy Brussels sprouts at Red Lobster. Eventually the mini cabbages caught on among home cooks, who realized that they could be good even without bacon, and became a staple of many a Thanksgiving table.
At this point, Brussels sprouts have become overexposed—and their flaws have become harder to ignore. They are rather tedious to prepare. The bottoms must be cut off one by one, and then each sprout must be cut in half. Some fancy recipes even involve individually pulling all the layers of leaves off each one, which sounds like some kind of boarding-school detention.
Cooking sprouts just right is also difficult. If you’re roasting them, you need to brown and crisp the outsides before the insides overcook and turn to mush. But you don’t want the bottom to blacken while the interior remains crunchy. As with French fries, the window for eating roasted Brussels sprouts closes quickly. Once they’ve been sitting for a few minutes, no matter how well you cooked them, they lose their crispiness and go mealy. (By the way, those “roasted” sprouts served at restaurants are typically not roasted but deep-fried. You have to drown them in oil to achieve similar results at home.)
And so the time has come to give Brussels sprouts a break and let cabbage have its close-up. According to a 2024 Times article, this process has already begun at hip restaurants. But cabbage has yet to catch on widely among home cooks, who in fact have been buying steadily less of it since the turn of the century. This might be because they find it intimidating in its bulk and density. Cabbage is the only vegetable that could plausibly fill in for a bowling ball. As a result it can be a bit hard to slice open, and it takes time to become tender.
These challenges are easily overcome. It is important to have a well-sharpened knife. Cut from one direction, and if you get stuck, rotate the cabbage and finish the cut from the other side. Don’t cut your pieces too thick, and have patience. Get your cabbage going early and give it the time it needs to cook through while you handle other kitchen tasks. If you’re roasting, slice it into wedges about 1.5 inches thick at the widest point, get some oil on it, and wait. Once the bottom is nice and charred, flip and repeat on the other side. Or use cabbage to make something even easier: soup. I must say that this is my personal favorite use case. Brown some ham and add onions, celery, carrots, white beans, and a finely chopped half-head of cabbage, then let it all simmer until the cabbage is nice and soft, perhaps 45 minutes. The result is sweet, savory, and a little smoky.
What other vegetable, cruciferous or otherwise, can play so many roles with such aplomb? The truth about the humble cabbage is that it is fit for a king.
Dining and Cooking