Always eat your greens

Much maligned thanks to the malodorous green sludge served up at school dinners, cabbage should be celebrated for its versatility and enjoyed steamed, then slathered in butter, says Tom Parker Bowles

- Tom Parker Bowles

My favourite recipe

BOILED cabbage à l’Anglaise is something compared to which steamed coarse newsprint bought from bankrupt Finnish salvage dealers and heated over smoky oil stoves is an exquisite delicacy,’ the journalist William Connor once sneered. He wasn’t alone in his disgust, because generations of British children were eternally scarred by the pong of sulphur and sorrow, as blameless brassica was brutally over simmered, transforming crisp leaf into vile, gripey sludge. And it was this institutionally malodorous reek that polluted drab, cold school corridors and gloomy dining rooms alike, food as penance and punishment, to endure rather than enjoy.

'That, for me, is all part of cabbage’s charm, a vegetable with as much punch as crunch'

It didn’t help that poor cabbage was vilified in children’s literature, too, with Roald Dahl leading the charge. There’s the Bucket family, with their relentlessly dyspeptic diet of thin cabbage soup in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. And the filthy old Granny in George’s Marvellous Medicine. ‘It’s not what you like or what you don’t like,’ snaps the wrinkled old bat. ‘It’s what’s good for you that counts. From now on, you must eat cabbage three times a day. Mountains of cabbage!’

Even Jane Grigson, not known for her furious outbursts on matters culinary, agreed that it ‘can smell foul in the pot, linger through the house with pertinacity, and ruin a meal with its wet flab’. But cabbage, like any other innocent ingredient, is not born bad. Rather it suffers indignities at the hands of unthinking cooks. It is a vegetable more sinned against than sinning.