In the early days of the pandemic, when our collective obsessive cooking was starting to look like a perverse way of dying slowly, I posted a dish of cabbage rolls on Instagram. Pre filter, the shot was in poor light. Full of shadows. The caption was simple, if not deprecating, a nod to the dish itself – cabbage rolls, made with the saddest cabbage on earth. The saddest cabbage on earth is the subject of the next picture, pruned to dear life, overtly pale , with paper thin leaves. Basically fully embracing its age. Early comments suggested that posting my swan-to-princess culinary creation on Instagram, the ultimate altar of our collective preening, had been the right call. Our national swan, a head of cabbage, had transformed into a princess right before our eyes!
Cabbage holds a special place in our national psyche. When a community of Xitsonga speakers was forcibly removed from their homes in the late 1980s to make way for Kruger National Park apartheid-era spatial planning, they particularly lamented being reduced to eating cabbage.
“…and here they have brought us to perish in this place, we get no relish here, our lips lips are parched from the malnutrition of cabbages, they have taken us away from the lovely country, in this country we have suffered , we wish for our home at Maluleke where we were safe and happy”
A community folk song – Harries, 1987
We continue to hate on this uncool, trusted, loyal side-kick that has seen us through tough times. A Samwise to our national Frodo if you will. A casual Google search on South African cabbage recipes turns up a handful, including peculiarly named Zulu cabbage. Peculiar because I am Zulu and I honestly don’t know if I have ever eaten Zulu cabbage. The sparseness of recipes is strange when you consider that after tomatoes, a base for daily stews and curries in tens of million homes, cabbage is the second most eaten vegetable.
Johane 14/ John 14 is what we call it. The biblical verse is perfect for any occasion – from funerals, baptisms, weddings to cell group testimony. ” ….In my Father’s house there are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you…I am the way, and the truth, and the life…”. Where I come from, we reserve the colloquial for coleslaw. A dish that is as comfortable in its skin in a humble funeral spread as it is in a fancy lobola ceremony meal.
Start reading the biblical verse for the beginning and the reason behind the popularity of cabbage becomes darker – “Let not your hearts be troubled…” Hope Malau, a chef and recipe book author, has said Johane 14 is a nod to the important role that cabbage plays when families fall on hard times. Pertinent in a country where 1 in 2 homes are hungry or are at risk of hunger. If you have cabbage, you should not let your heart be troubled. You will not go to bed hungry.
We ditch cabbage as soon as we can afford to. By 2015, we were growing a third less cabbage than we were in 1990 in commercial farms despite there being millions more of us. Statistics SA has confirmed that poorer homes spend double what well-off families spend on cabbage. Outside of academia and literature, you only need to visit the nearest spaza, the natural habitat of the saddest cabbage in the world. You’ll find it on a makeshift shelf, sitting by itself, gradually being pruned as it wilts like a debutante at the ball. Waiting for someone to ask for a dance week after week. Someone will finally pick it. But not until there is no other debutante to dance with.
Never has a food fallen fallen so far from grace. Greeks believed cabbage was a gift from the gods as far back as 600BC. Popular culture has it that cabbage was once used as potent treatment for gout, stomach problems, headaches and deafness. A member of the Brassica oleracea var. capitata family, it would seem that the vegetable is a victim of its own abundance, resilience and accessibility. Contrary to common belief, it is nutritious and particularly high in vitamin K, vitamin C and fibre. Why won’t we give it more love
