[This is the first in a series of posts on Hungarian foods.]
Stuffed cabbage was a dish I picked at as a child, and over time it sank into the deepest recesses of my mind. I’d surely never eat it again. But one evening in my early thirties it rose to the surface, bringing with it something of the past.
He Kept A Shotgun In The Corner
I was living and working in central Connecticut. I changed apartments after the first year, looking to save on rent. The new building was small, old and more than a little run-down. The building had a name, Hy-up, written in concrete on the side of the structure. The ground floor was occupied by a young couple who fought late into the night. One day they were evicted by force. The owner lived on the top floor. He had a glass eye, the result of a bad motorcycle accident, was often a little drunk, and kept a shotgun in the corner of the main room of his place. He was gruff, but he took a liking to me, and sometimes, to break up a long, quiet weekend, I stopped up to say hello.
The wattage was low, the floors creaky, and the wooden staircase that led from the outside to my third-floor entrance groaned from the effort of holding me up. But the view offered a measure of relief. The building was set into a hillside, and I spent many evenings in a chair in my bedroom, looking out over athletic fields, past the juvenile detention center, at the forest in the distance.
I Had No Idea How To Get Cabbage Leaves Soft
One winter, the snow seemed to obscure everything but long days at work and evenings in that chair meditating on the purple-white view. I had been thinking about becoming a vegetarian, and one day, while toying with that idea, I thought, for no apartment reason, I’d make stuffed cabbage for dinner. I loved to cook from intuition, to invent things in the moment. So, I went out and bought some vegetarian sausage (Apologies. I know I’ve just caused heart attacks across Hungary!), a cabbage, canned plum tomatoes, and a few other ingredients. I had no idea how to get the cabbage leaves soft enough to roll. What I did was boil a big pot of water, dunk a whole cabbage in it for a few minutes, take it out, and peel off a few of the softened leaves.
Well, it worked anyway. I took a small handful of the “meat”-and-rice mixture I’d made, compressed it into a sort of football shape (American football), rolled it up in a leaf, tucked in the edges, and placed it in a glass baking dish. Then I boiled the cabbage some more. When I had filled the dish, I covered the whole thing in a sauce of broth and chopped tomatoes, and put it in the oven.
While the dish cooked, I returned to my window seat. I thought about work and the friends I would see that weekend in New York. I thought about my grandmother, who I had begun to meet-up with occasionally on trips into the city. I had found her to be a warm, interesting, even comforting presence, and had unexpectedly begun to look forward to our visits. My mind wandered to the story she had told me last time about a ride she’d once taken in the side-car of her favorite cousin’s motorcycle. She must have been an adolescent or young teen, and I thought about how hard she had laughed as she recalled how her cousin had sped up near the end of the ride, and how the motorcycle had run off the road at a curve it couldn’t handle, how it had rolled over numerous times. “I was in bed for two weeks!” she had said, her shoulders shaking with laughter, her face turning bright red. “Jaj, it was terrible!”
Tang And Moisture
When I was young, my grandmother felt distant to me, with her odd formality, strange accent, and opera-tinted view of the world. Stuffed cabbage embodied the feelings of those early years. It was strange and never grew on me. The sauce, if it could be called that, was runny and weak. Cabbage? Does any food have less flavor and personality than cabbage leaves? And the ground meat and rice combination wrapped inside? It was uninteresting to a young boy. Why not just alter it a little and turn it into meatballs for spaghetti and meatballs?
Stuffed cabbage should have vanished from my life. But food forges powerful memories, not only of smells, but of people, relationships, and feelings, and of ourselves at a moment in life. Looking back on that evening now, the connection between the start of those visits with my grandmother and the seemingly spontaneous impulse to cook stuffed cabbage seems pretty clear.
The timer went off and I pulled the baking dish out of the oven, served myself, and took a seat at my small round dining table. The stuffed cabbage was delicious. No, really. The spice of the (vegetarian) sausage-rice center, balanced by the soft texture and gentle flavor of the cabbage leaves, together with the tang and moisture of the cooked tomatoes. I froze the leftovers and enjoyed them for weeks.
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