The key ingredient: brassicas

Brassicas, for most children and many husbands, rhyme with “Yuck”. 

The world makes a sport of cheap shots aimed at the cruciferous family, which includes broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, the fractal Romanesco, and brash cousin horseradish.

Internet memes abound, led by an early influencer by the name of Mark Twain, who not-so-famously wrote that cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education. Or perhaps today, an end-of-world bunker in New Zealand. You can buy a T-shirt that advocates cooking your kale with coconut oil, so it is easier to scrape into the rubbish, and a previous US President went so far as to ban broccoli from Airforce One (you can hear his petulant foot stomp, goddammit).

And yet brassicas are the most widely consumed group of plants in Europe and elsewhere – in 2023 the Greeks had the highest per capita consumption (275kg per person annually) with China coming in a close second (270kg) and India and Mexico hot on their heels.

These vegetables for me are the most fun you can have while eating things that are good for you. They reduce oxidative stress, whatever that is; stave off scurvy should you be time travelling soon; induce detoxifying enzymes; stimulate your immune system and reduce inflammation; decrease the risk of some cancers, heart attacks and strokes; and their rear-guard ninjas ward off all those free radicals threatening us on a daily basis.

They can be served up raw and roasted, crisp and tender. Shredded ‘whisper thin’ as one of my mother’s old recipe card instructs, cabbage and sprouts give us the braai staple cole slaw; red cabbage braised in red wine and vinegar (never water!) with raisins and apples can be a lifeline; you’ll find people massaging kale on YouTube, or frying it, and it’s high-end Tuscan sibling is integral to ribollita. Importantly, one cannot duplicate a New York Bloody Mary without horseradish.

I have a salt tooth, so given that brassicas are at their best paired with salty ingredients, it’s easy to understand their global domination. The Chinese give them a bath in soy and black bean sauce; the British pair them with blue cheese (one wag of a cookbook author suggests that this combination might be a threat or a promise, depending on where you stand on pungent flavours); and Italians shake them in a snow globe of Parmigiano. Taken to their salty, funky extreme, they give us kimchi and sauerkraut.

The first time I was successfully romanced by a Brussels sprout was in a Mexican restaurant, where they served them crisply roasted with a chile de arbol sauce (you can use Tabasco), toasted pumpkin seeds, salted peanuts and lime.

Bacon, or “fairy dust” as it is known around our house, is a natural to tame bitter brassicas. The Irish make colcannon, which is (with variations) fried cabbage, bacon and parsley sauce. In Sicily pancetta stands in for bacon with cabbage and pasta and in the American South, “maw-maw” is famous for her fried cabbage in bacon grease with caramelised onions.

Comfort food for me on a cold winter’s night consists of mushrooms careening about in the pan drippings after you’ve fried some bacon or pancetta, adding kale, garlic and broth to marry the flavours, then brightening it all with some lemon zest and dishing it up over creamy polenta.

If bacon were a fish, it would be an anchovy. They are a fine addition to roasted brassicas with some vinegar and a little sugar lovingly tumbled about in some walnut oil. When Karen Dudley had her restaurant in Woodstock, Cape Town, she blanched tenderstem broccoli for a couple of minutes in boiling water and then roasted it with olive oil, rosemary, anchovies and garlic. The florets should shatter when you bite them.

If you don’t have a salt tooth, you can always seek out the harmoniousness of cauliflower and truffle. The food writer David Rosengarten once likened the flavour of truffles to a combination of cheese, garlic, cauliflower and sex (the fun of typing that sentence is the only reason I’m taking you down this rabbit hole) and Marco Pierre White makes a cabbage and truffle soup. And who knew? The very scent component of truffles for which the truffle pigs are snouting in the forests of Europe is the same as the sulphuric fug of cooking cabbage in the hallway of a Romanian block of flats. If you feel like cooking all day long, you can make this recipe for chargrilled beef fillet with cabbage and truffle mash.

The world needs to rethink these unloved vegetables. A chef at a restaurant in New Orleans would probably agree after he became famous by – wait for it – roasting a whole head of cauliflower in his pizza oven and serving it with a whipped feta cheese dip (blitz up 100 g soft goat cheese, 85 g cream cheese and 85 g feta in about a third of a cup of cream, 2 T olive oil and some salt and pepper).

And who can forget that we have Albert “Cubby” Broccoli to thank for bringing us the memorable scene in Never Say Never Again? Fatima Blush waterskis up to the bar where Sean Connery has just been served his martini, colliding with him and prompting her to say, “Oh, how reckless of me! I made you all wet.” James Bond replies, “Yes, but my martini is still dry.”