How to cook a snake

A recipe for Golubtsy - stuffed cabbage rolls

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

Monday was St Patrick’s Day. Not being Irish, I missed it. Although I am English, I forget St George’s Day, too. It’s not a tenth of the hoolie that St Patrick’s Day can be, so blink and it’s easily gone unnoticed. Besides, too many of us use the day to cause mayhem not joy.

But I wonder, does St Patrick’s Day field the right symbols for representing the saint? Rather than being celebrated by all manner of emerald elements - shamrocks, leprechauns, rivers dyed green and Guinness (too much of which makes you go green), surely events should focus instead on snakes. After all, the saint who rid Ireland of serpents is what the day commemorates.

If you had wanted advice on how to cook a snake for the occasion, here it is for next time round: Don’t bother. I have eaten them and they taste - you won’t be surprised to hear - like chicken. Not, of course, the chicken of yesteryear’s succulence; the chicken of today’s industrial production. I was swimming in the seas off Bali when several yards of black-and-yellow garden hose wiggled up alongside. Happily, a fisherman noticed not my danger but his lunch. He swam out and thwacked the serpent with a plug of tree-stump, rolled the snake’s skin off like a Moulin Rouge stocking, then cooked him over driftwood on the beach. Yum.

I contend my experience gives me a closer relationship to snakes than St Patrick ever had. He is said to have chased some into the sea off a mountain where he was fasting, after they had attacked him. There are no, and never were, any snakes in Ireland. The last Ice Age, followed by rising sea levels, prevented snakes from colonising the island. But one shouldn’t let facts get in the way of a good story.

When it comes to facts, nor was Patrick, strictly speaking, a saint, never having been canonised. Or even Irish. Kidnapped from his family in England by Irish raiders, he was hustled into Ireland as a slave and forced to herd animals. Staring at sheep and pigs for six years helped develop his faith until he roused himself to escape back across the Irish Sea to the comforts of his English home.

But, if we’re to focus on the ‘green’, there is an established association between Patrick and shamrocks. Apparently, when later a saint-in-waiting, he would use the three-leafed plant to explain the concept of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Stained glass window of St Patrick with shamrock, St. Benin's Church, Kilbennan, County Galway

I offer you these minor corrections only now the day has passed as I didn’t want to put a damper on it, even if that was pretty unlikely. I shan’t offer you a snake recipe. I’m focusing on the ‘green’ angle for an ingredient whose dish (plus a few extras) is more readily-welcomed all year round.

What more green and Irish could fit the bill than cabbage? Colcannon, after all, is a traditional St Patrick’s Day dish also delicious the rest of the year.

Descended from a wild, acridly bitter kale-like plant growing around the coasts of northern France and the British Isles, cabbages began to be domesticated in Europe around 2,500 years ago. Born around 373 AD, Patrick is thought to have set captive foot in Ireland aged 16, so cabbage would have formed a regular part of his diet.

It’s probably the fault of the English and their habit of boiling every last nutrient and flavour out of vegetables, causing every nook and cranny of the household to reek, that gave cabbage its inferior reputation. For all my school years, lunch was cooked by a team of elderly women led by the even older Fanny, dressed in a starched pinny over an ankle-length royal blue dress. She made the national press when she reached the age of 90 and was still employed there. Every other day, we were fed cabbage, meat and potatoes, (in between it was salad, meat and potatoes). The meat was as stiff and grey as cardboard, the boiled potatoes sodden, the cabbage stewed to rags and stinking out the school. (Still, it was a lunch better for us than Turkey Twizzlers.)

Even had we thought of complaining, which would never have crossed our disciplined minds, at least we weren’t in the position of those boys at Trets in Provence, training in 1364 for the priesthood, who were served cabbage soup 125 days of the year. But, then, you would never compare French cooking of the 14th century with my beyond antediluvian English school cooking of the 20th.

The Romans considered cabbage a luxury. By the Middle Ages, it was such a respected staple it even appeared in illustrated manuscripts. From the Renaissance onwards, the people living around and well beyond the area now known as Germany devoted themselves enthusiastically to developing different varieties.

Full-flavoured, crinkle-leaved, deep-veined Savoy cabbage

Savoy cabbage, just one in the very large Brassica oleracea group and not from the Savoie but from Holland, was one of the first, introduced in the 16th century. Its name came from Savoyekool - the kool part being the cole of coleslaw. England’s first cabbages were planted by Sir Anthony Ashley, whose life spanned the 16th and 17th centuries, in Wimborne, Dorset (bottom of the country a little to the left of the middle).

Other cabbage varieties appeared across northern, eastern and central Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. On his first Pacific voyage in 1768, Captain Cook was charged by the English Navy to trial the efficacy of 'Sour Krout', cabbage fermented with lactic acid bacteria, in combating scurvy. The Endeavour was provisioned with 7,860 pounds of sauerkraut, a ration of 1 kilo/2 pounds per man per week. The sailors slept in hammocks. With the post-digestive effect of cabbage consumption, the atmosphere on the lower deck must have been challenging.

By the 19th century, cabbages had been introduced into the New World, Asia and beyond. Now China produces 48 percent of the total 71 million tonnes grown globally.

How many of these cabbages have you eaten? Most probably Green Cabbage, similar to Dutch White Cabbage, Danish Ballhead Cabbage, Late Flat Dutch Cabbage, and Cannonball Cabbage, all common to most supermarkets, along with Red Cabbage, Savoy Cabbage, and Conehead, Sweetheart or Hispi Cabbage.

You’ll know Tuscan Cabbage more familiarly as cavolo nero. But how about January King Cabbage, its green leaves tinged with purple, Portuguese Cabbage or Couve Portuguesa, used in Caldo Verde soup, Earliana Cabbage, also known as Early Jersey Wakefield, Golden Acre Cabbage, Red Acre Cabbage, Copenhagen Market Cabbage, Deadon Cabbage, Gonzales Cabbage, Parel Cabbage, Bilko Cabbage, a little like Chinese or Napa Cabbage, Charleston Wakefield Cabbage, Mammoth Red Rock, and Rubicon Cabbage? (Tom Lehrer would have liked this list.)

Then there’s the flattish white cabbage, sweetish, less compact, and quite the best for salads, that I’ve seen both in the Middle East and in Taiwan,

and the Chinese varieties: Choy Sum, Napa Cabbage, known in Europe as Chinese Cabbage, Bok Choy, and others. Also, (Pub Quiz): did you know Brussels Sprouts are actually a variety of tiny cabbage? And that Kohlrabi is part of the family?

For St Patrick's Day next year but also for now until real spring, a substantial one-pot soup/meal that involves cabbage and would last you several days is Garbure from southwest France, whose recipe you will find here.

But I’ve taken to keeping in my fridge a Kilner jar of pickled cabbage, for nibbling on, just by itself, or perhaps with a chunk of hard cheese, and for adding alongside a platter of thickly sliced barbecued flank steak, or a wok of Chinese stir-fried noodles. It’s that versatile. The recipe is simple: 1, 2, 3. You chop chunks or slice fairly thickly less than a quarter of a supermarket cabbage (or if more, double everything), dump it in a mixing bowl and, in 140ml/¼ pint of water, simmer together until melted 1 teaspoon of salt, 2 tablespoons of sugar, take off the heat then add 3 tablespoons of white wine or apple vinegar, pour the liquid over the cabbage to steep then bottle it. It lasts longer in the fridge than you are likely to let it. (The same recipe works nicely with sticks of daikon or carrot.)

My mother’s cooking method for cabbage was always to melt a large lump of butter over low heat, sweat a thinly sliced small onion in it then add finely sliced cabbage, stir, add a scant two 140ml/¼ pint of chicken stock or water, stir it about and slam on the lid. Stew over the lowest possible heat, stirring it once or twice, until the liquid has evaporated (remove the lid if not), and the cabbage has just begun to catch and caramelise. Salt it to taste and serve it with plenty of freshly ground black pepper. It goes with everything.

In Moscow, we regularly ate golubtsy, stuffed cabbage rolls whose name translates as ‘little doves’, apparently because they look like little birds resting with their wings folded beneath them. The fillings vary, depending on region. In the Central Asian republics they are stuffed with lamb, in the Baltic States they’re made with pork or bacon. If you make them, they will doubtless be familiar to you as Middle Eayern dolma.

Photo by Karolina Kołodziejczak on Unsplash

Serves 6-8
900g/2lb white cabbage
500g/1 lb minced/ground lamb, pork or beef
90g/3 oz rice boiled in salted water till tender then drained
1 medium onion, peeled and finely chopped
1 egg
1-2 tablespoons fresh mint, parsley, dill (all or just one of them) finely minced
1/2 teaspoon salt and freshly ground black pepper

Separate the large leaves of the cabbage, crush the fat end of the stalk a little by leaning on it with the wrist end of your hand, or rolling pin, then blanch them, several at a time, in a large pan of boiling water until wilted, 2-3 minutes, and drop into a large bowl of cold water as you go.

Mix together all the remaining ingredients in a bowl. Spread a cabbage leaf over a board, thick part of the stalk closest to you, set a dessertspoonful of the meat mixture in the centre 2.5cm/1 in away from the edge. Fold either side of the leaf over the meat then roll it all the way up. Place each stuffed leaf close together in a wide saucepan dish, in several layers if necessary.

Make a medium-thick tomato sauce by sweating a medium onion peeled and finely chopped in a lump of butter till translucent. Add a can of peeled tomatoes roughly crushed with a fork and a teaspoon of sugar, and season to taste. Fill the tomato can about a quarter way up with water and swirl it about to gather every last drop off the tin’s wall and stir into to the cooking pan. Pour over the golubtsy and simmer, tightly covered, over very low heat for around 45 minutes to an hour. If you’d prefer to bake them, preheat the oven to 180C/350F and cook them under a crumpled sheet of parchment paper you then enclose with a double layer of aluminium foil, for the same length of time. Test with the point of a knife for done-ness. I confess I didn’t make the version in the photograph. Had I done so, there would have been spoonfuls of sour cream dolloped randomly over the dish. Which in Moscow we never ate them without.