I hate red cabbage.
Anyone who's ever worked in a professional kitchen knows that Health and Safety regulations demand the wearing of blue plasters for anyone with an open wound who handles food. The logic behind this is that there is no such thing as blue food, and so ensures that if someone's sticky plaster drops off into a customer's dinner, it can be spotted easily. Hopefully before you actually serve it to the customer. My Dad is a man that's spent his life being the exception that proves the rule; one time, Mum trusted to him to cook dinner. We were served blue food.
My Dad only really knows how to cook one dish, and that dish is fried cabbage. It's essentially cabbage and egg. I'm sure he probably put some other bits and pieces in, but you wouldn't know because you're so unwilling to taste the damn stuff that you just put it on the back of the tongue, open your throat, swallow it whole, and hope for the best. I suppose I should be thanking him really... All that epiglottis training means that I can down a pint of lager in under 8 seconds; 5 seconds for bitter. Give me a bendy straw and I can get a bottle of beer down in a little under two seconds. Anyway. Off went my Dear Pa to the local supermarket, from which he returned with all the ingredients required to make his culinary masterpiece. Except that they didn't have any Savoy cabbage. So he bought the next best thing.
The pigment in red cabbage has a rather interesting property; the colour is altered depending on the pH of its surrounds. Okay, that's not at all interesting to anyone out of primary school. Anyway, in an acidic environment (<7.0), the pigment is red. In a basic environment (>7.0), it's blue. I'm sure some of you can already sense where this is going. Fresh egg yolks have a pH of around 6.2 (acidic) and the white has a pH of 7.4 (basic). However, the egg white gradually becomes more alkaline as the egg gets older because of CO2 diffusing out of the white through the egg shell. The pH can get as high as 9.3. Trust me when I was that this is alkaline enough that combining it with red cabbage results in an ugly mess of blue food that causes your stomach to clench tightly.
I hate red cabbage.
However, my hatred of red cabbage didn't start here. Oh no. For its origins we're going to have to go back to a slightly earlier point in time. My maternal grandparents were British Colonial Empire types who spent most of their working lives out in Kenya. They eventually retired back to Blighty when I was around seven. We drove down to see them soon after they'd moved into their new place, which was a good three hours away by car. I was one of those kids that everyone refused to sit next to on school trips. My father had to stop the car three times along the way to allow my poor, abused, immature stomach to attempt to eject itself out of my body. We finally arrived (to my VTZ's relief) and sat and relaxed while we waited for lunch to be served. Another thing about my Grandparents (God rest their souls) is that they were from a time where children were to be seen, and not heard. This life-outlook jarred considerable with my 7yr old outlook, which was basically to run around being a pain in the arse; my version of relaxing back in the day. Not only that, but they thought it very important that a child minded its Ps and Qs. I'd heard of the concept of saying 'please' and 'thank-you', but was still having trouble putting the theory into practice. So, by the time we were sat at the dining table, things were (how to put this...) tense. And then my grandmother served up lunch.
At this point, may I direct your attention to this recipe here? Please come back after, I'm not done preaching at you yet.
Read it? Good. I would have written it out myself except a) the recipe was already here b) even the thought of having to write it out made my gullet rise.
That concoction there was part of the meal served up to me. The rest of it was steak and kidney pudding (kidneys also have a tendency to make me gag) and mashed potato. The only thing this meal had going for it was the mashed potato; and even that was ruined by my Grandmother's love of black pepper. There was no way I was eating this meal. Unfortunately, my Grandparents also believed that you ate what was put in front of you without complaint. I think it's fair to say that that meal is in the Top Twenty traumatic incidents of my life so far. Every mouthful was some kind of torture that had to be endured, least I be denied this week's pocket money. The only consoling factor is that I got to stop three times on the way back home to jettison the hellish repast.
I hate red cabbage.
The taxonomic formula for red cabbage is:
Kingdom: Plantae
Division: Magnoliophyta
Class: Magnoliopsida
Order: Brassicales
Family: Brassicaceae
Genus: Brassica
Species: B. oleracea var. capitata f. rubra
Now, I'll come straight out and admit it; I am a rubraist. I have no problem with the whites and savoys of the world, but the red cabbage is an insult to my existence. I wouldn't mind so much, but they come over here, taking up supermarket shelf space, and what do we get out of it? A sickly sweet affront to the taste buds, that's what. I think they should just go back to where they come from. They're probably breeding with our whites and savoys to produce a bunch of half-casts as well.
Don't get me wrong. I do view them as an inferior cabbage, but that doesn't mean that I think that they should all be destroyed. I know that there are some extremist elements that go about burning cabbage patches (who can forget the cabbage patch tragedy of 1997, when a colour blind campaigner mistook a field of savoys for their lesser-cousins?), but there is a problem here that has to be addressed. I noticed the other day that they're now being used in salad mixes; is our beloved coleslaw to be next? Act today. Contact your local branch of CCARC for more information on this important issue. Remember kids: Don't get fed the red!
References:
- Food Resource - http://food.oregonstate.edu/learn/egg.html
- Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_cabbage
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