Guest post by Mrs. Withers
When I was a kid in Oklahoma in the 80’s my Mom hated vegetables with a passion. We lived on a farm and grew a quarter-acre garden of mostly vegetables, but they caused her a lot of consternation. I can’t recall Mom ever working in the garden. After we moved away I don’t recall her buying any fresh vegetables again, unless you count a bag of potatoes.
One of my favorite foods today is cabbage. It’s very easy to prepare in any number of ways, the easiest being: cut it up and saute it in a pan with a little oil, onion, garlic and seasoning optional – always tastes great. Serve it with a bit of rice or pop it into a soup. Done.
The main take away I learned as an adult: it doesn’t take long to cook cabbage.
Once or twice a year Mom went to cook cabbage and it always started out with excessive worry. I think she may have been trying to diet at the time which may explain why she particularly HATED the cabbage soup and turned it into long slog of misery to cook it.
Mom would get a large bit of pork, several pounds at least. Pork loin was too dang fancy, what are we the Reagan’s? Ham hock was disgusting: It’s a FOOT! So she would carefully decide upon the appropriate middle class pork. The point here is there was a 3:1 ratio of pork to cabbage easily.
Then she had to cut up the cabbage and fill a huge stock pot with water and the pork. She didn’t really think to use stock. She added salt and pepper as seasoning.
Then she started cooking it and that went on: ALL DAY. From the early morning until around 1pm when it was ‘ready’ she cooked the ever loving hell out of that cabbage. Every room in the small square house reeked like sulfur.
“MOM – WHAT IS THAT SMELL!” ‘It’s just how cabbage smells’ she would reply with a nose wrinkle.
“Cabbage takes a long time to cook” she would say. The whole house would be filled with a green house level of cabbage-humidity and unbelievably bad smell.
Cabbage was done when you really couldn’t discern much if any cabbage, and it was mostly hot pork-water as far as taste went.
It was always a special occasion when we had cabbage, that ‘old-time food’. Processed food was really considered ‘better’, food of the middle class I suppose. Sugar and Crisco were mainstays. We didn’t drink water.
I like my soup better. Guess that’s the end of the story.
