Recipe of the week: Stuffed cabbage

It is the splendour of the Christmas table, it is the taste of grandma’s love and it is the indispensable part of the festivity – it is the stuffed cabbage. This hearty meal is the essential part of the Hungarian cuisine, which you must try when in Hungary 🙂

“…and then came the stuffed cabbage.” According to origo.hu, this is how the dish is frequently mentioned. It is usually followed by a deep sigh or moan. The sentence is usually said at the time of festivities, after Christmas Eve or a wedding night when recalling the menu. This part of the sentence has several meanings. First of all, we’d like to express how much we love stuffed cabbage and that we wouldn’t miss it for a thing. But it also means distress, because we tend to believe that if we miss the festivities without eating stuffed cabbage, we’ll be the victims of some kind of curse.

Stuffed cabbage plays an important but somehow secondary role in the festive menu: it always comes when we’re already full with the other delicacies. And we’re also afraid that we won’t be able to fit it onto our stomach. So we sigh. At weddings, it is served in the middle of the night when you’ve already eaten six courses, but you feel like you need to refuel so that you can keep on drinking and dancing.

This secondary role is especially interesting considering that it is such a hearty meal that a plate of stuffed cabbage can fill you up for the whole day. And you can’t make a small portion, it is usually made in a big batch. This is why stuffed cabbage is a beloved leftover from the Christmas menu.

According to the ethnographic lexicon, it is a meal of Turkish origin, which was originally a rice-meat filling stuffed in vine-leaves. It is an old recipe, because it is already mentioned in the oldest Hungarian cookbooks.

The ancestor of the stuffed cabbage was cabbage-meat in the Hungarian cuisine. The dish spread in the Balkans and Hungary in the 17h-18^th century. The Szakácsmesterségek cookbook from 1695 featured two versions. One of them was the cabbage from Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) which called for goose or hen meat, while the other stuffed cabbage recipe called for “cow meat” and ginger.

The recipe of stuffed cabbage went through a lot of changes throughout history, and it still remains one of those meals with plenty of variations. Every family makes it differently, with different secret ingredients. Opinions also differ on the most important steps and ingredients. Is the meat the most important part? Is it the dumpling? Or is it the cabbage? Do you have to precook the rice, do you need eggs and do you need to stir it?

It would be impossible to reach consensus in these questions and to find an ultimate or best recipe. We picked one we liked, but it is quite probable that your neighbour, mother, grandma does something differently. Nonetheless, we hope you enjoy 🙂