The Morning: Is cabbage the new bacon?

How a workhorse vegetable became a darling of the culinary world.

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story March 10, 2024 By Kim Severson Good morning. Cabbage, a staple of cuisines around the world, is having a star turn on the American culinary scene. Shawn Michael Jones for The New York Times Head of the class In a world in which it's hard for a vegetable to get a break, cabbage is winning. Cabbage has been a global culinary workhorse for centuries. (China grows the most; Russia eats the most.) It has fed generations of American immigrants. But now, a vegetable that can make your house smell like a 19th-century tenement has become the darling of the culinary crowd. In the words of my mother-in-law: Cabbage, who knew? Like so many American food trends, fancy cabbage dishes first started turning up in restaurants on the coasts a few years ago. But they are fast spreading across the country. One chef has compared this cabbage mania to the hoopla over bacon in the 1990s. In Denver, Sap Sua sprinkles a charred cabbage wedge with anchovy breadcrumbs. Cabbage is bathed in brown-butter hollandaise at Gigi's Italian Kitchen in Atlanta. At Good Hot Fish in Asheville, N.C., shredded green cabbage stars in a pancake punched up with sorghum hot sauce. For a story in The Times, I spoke with farmers, chefs and food critics and ate cabbage in three cities, seeking to understand how the vegetable earned this moment in the spotlight. In today's newsletter, I'll explain what I found. Kimchi and Caraflex A cabbage dish at Chi Spacca in Los Angeles.  Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times The trajectory of a food trend in the United States can sometimes be easy to trace. A French chef introduces the heavily salted butter caramels of Brittany to the elite of the American food world, pastry chefs at expensive restaurants start to play with the idea, and before you know it, you're ordering a salted caramel cold brew from Dunkin'. But tracking down Cabbage Zero, the one that started the current cruciferous renaissance, is not as easy as tipping a hat to Roy Choi for wrapping kimchi and bulgogi in a corn tortilla, thus kicking off the Korean taco craze. Kimchi, whose main ingredient is cabbage, has helped the cause. Its meteoric rise among cooks and diners who weren't raised in Korean households has been buoyed by the interest in all things fermented and gut-friendly (much to the chagrin of some purists, who hate what they refer to as "hipster kimchi"). There was even a spike in sauerkraut and kimchi sales when people thought fermented cabbage might ward off Covid. Cabbage can also thank brussels sprouts, the gateway Brassica that worked its way onto menus after the chef David Chang started pan roasting it with bacon at Momofuku Noodle Bar in 2004. None of this would be happening without farmers, of course. A decade or so ago, farmers who sell largely to restaurants began to grow more specialty cabbages, like the small, tender Caraflex, often called the conehead or arrowhead because of its pointy tip. Chefs looking to create dishes for a new, plant-forward world discovered that coneheads looked gorgeous when quartered and sauced on a plate, and were easy to braise, roast or char. A big year The trend is still going strong. Leaves of purple cabbage are enlisted to swaddle mapo tofu at Poltergeist, the current culinary fascination in Los Angeles. At Superiority Burger in New York City, cabbage is gently enrobing sticky rice studded with tofu and braised mushrooms. Of course, most of the cabbage Americans eat is still in the form of coleslaw or, to a lesser degree, sauerkraut. And the Department of Agriculture notes that the amount of cabbage Americans eat measured per capita is about six pounds. In 2000, it was closer to nine. Still, among the food-forward, cabbage fever is rising. 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