Stir-fried cabbage and leek
How to build a comforting meal around cabbage ft rice, sauce, and dumplings
Hey there! My name is Apoorva Sripathi, I’m a writer, editor, and artist. This week’s paid subscriber newsletter is a recipe for stir-fried cabbage and leek paired with rice for a quick lunch. I hope you’ll give it a go. If you’d like to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. Thank you so much.
One of my favourite sentences (written by me of course) involves cabbages: “I love chopping up cabbage into tiny, tiny shreds, stacking the leaves on top of each other and folding them over like bookmarking a page over itself because I hate the idea of a separate bookmark.” I wrote this for an essay on cooking with my mother back in February and have to report that nothing has changed. I still read without a bookmark, I still shred cabbage the same way. The crunch in slicing chunks of folded cabbage is satisfying and ephemeral that sometimes I cook cabbage just so I can slice them – which is how this recipe came about.
For the longest time, the only cabbage recipe I would make was stir fried cabbage in tempered mustard seeds, lentils, curry leaves, coconut, chillies, and garlic, where the cabbage is caramelised1 to an inch of its being. We’d have this, my parents and I, with sambar and rice on Mondays. Every Monday was stir-fried cabbage with coconut, sambar on rice, some lentils, yoghurt and pickle. Somehow we looked forward to every Monday even if Sundays beckoned us with the promise of fried potatoes.
As I write this, my partner is in the kitchen making us dumplings and rice. Initially we promised ourselves to only have fried dumplings for lunch, half veggie-half chicken. Then we said we needed rice. Rice and dumplings, a respectable lunch on a cold day2. Writing this newsletter while watching my partner soak rice and deliberate on how much to make, I jumped at the thought of converting this into a proper meal with a vegetable. A cabbage? A cabbage, but stir-fried with leeks, garlic, and ginger; seasoned with soy, white pepper, and MSG; and topped with sesame seeds. So we went from dumplings to dumplings and rice to dumplings and rice and cabbage.
This is also the trajectory of this newsletter: I started writing a recipe for smothered cabbage and rice soup, based on the Marcella Hazan classic from Essentials of Italian Cooking, to which I added my own spicing: toasted and finely ground coriander and cumin seeds, white pepper, some dill, and a handful of puy lentils. And then I abandoned it halfway to go and make the cabbage and leek stir fry, a sauce for dumplings, build the bowl and eat lunch with my partner, wash up the dishes while he did the laundry and then both of us went back to our work.
It’s what Hazan alludes to in the introduction of her book: “It is a pattern of cooking that can accommodate improvisation and fresh intuitions each time it is taken in hand, as long as it continues to be a pattern we can recognise, as long as its evolving forms comfort us with that essential attribute of the civilised life, familiarity.” Comfort via cabbage.