OPB’s “Superabundant” explores the stories behind the foods of the Pacific Northwest with videos, articles and this weekly newsletter. Every week, Heather Arndt Anderson, a Portland-based culinary historian, food writer and ecologist, highlights different aspects of the region’s food ecosystem. This week she offers a recipe for golubtsy (cabbage rolls) stuffed with a mixture of buckwheat kasha, ground meat and wild mushrooms.
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If you read any history, you probably know that the more things change, the more they stay the same. In all our complexity, human societies are as beholden to natural cycles as a migrating meadowlark or a camas bloom. Cycles of human thought may operate on a different temporal scale, but at the end of the day, they’re just as seasonal.
Philosophical pendulums swing back and forth like the populations of lynx following the snowshoe hare; ideas are recycled, maybe updated a little before they resurface on the other end of the arc. Conservatism and progressivism co-evolve in response to one another and take turns being on top, like the garter snake and the rough-skinned newt.
But change is also a thing, often born of cultures connecting. About a century ago, as Portlanders tapped into the thoughtstreams of revolutionaries across the globe, a humble Slavic dish gained popularity in Pacific Northwest restaurants and dining rooms: the cabbage roll. A healthy cruciferous winter dish, its roots can be traced to the Middle East, with another dish that’s still common today — do you know what it is? Read on to find out!
James Beard Semifinalists announced
Congrats to all TWELVE nominees representing Oregon! Finalists will be announced in April, and winners will be crowned in June.Not a bad place to get kale
According to the agricultural machinery marketplace Excavator Parts Direct (using Trip Advisor and Google reviews), Portland Farmers Market’s Portland State University location is the second-best winter farmers market in the country. Winter produce isn’t the only thing going for it, though — the cheeses and baked goods are also worth gearing up for.
It’s still quite wintery in markets, but the colder snap means crucifers like collards will sweeten up. There were also some pretty little turnips for making nukazuke (my wheat bran nukadoko has somehow remained alive over the past few months!). If you’re up for something wacky, make fuchsia baek-kimchi using the purple napa cabbage, purple daikon, red onion and purple carrots that are all in peak season right now (you can use sliced fresh chiles if you like a little heat).
Winter citrus also continues to brighten up everything from salad dressings to cocktails — I started a batch of yuzu bitters with bay leaves and gentian to jazz up the NA spritzes that have made for a really pleasant January booze break.
As bird flu continues to drive egg prices sky high, I have to give a shout-out to my Light Brahma hen Pearl, who has continued laying an egg almost every single day throughout the winter — with no lights in the coop! — while her freeloading sisters kick dirt.
Lately, in the “Superabundant” kitchen
✨ The rice cooker really came to the rescue this week — having hot rice at the ready means dinner can come together in just a few minutes. One night there was a tofu and broccoli stir-fry with black bean sauce, and another night there was aloo gobi and red lentil dal.
✨ I scored a half-price rotisserie chicken whose only fault was that it was a bit dry, so I pulled off the white meat and chucked the rest into the soup pot. After a slow simmer with some vegetables, I pulled the dark meat from the bones, returned it and the white meat to the pot, and cooked some fluffy dumplings right in the soup.
✨ In tribute to filmmaker David Lynch (who died last week), I baked a cherry pie with a jagged lattice top. Since I only had sweet cherries (everyone knows tart ones are superior for pie), I added a few spoonfuls of sour cornelian cherry jam and a few pinches of citric acid.
Recipe: Buckwheat golubtsy (Slavic-style cabbage rolls)
In our current age of abundance, it can be easy to forget how much food — or lack thereof — has shaped political history. Food shortages during World War I, for example, were a key driver of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which installed Socialism as the dominant political philosophy for a huge swath of the planet.Socialist ideas found fertile soil in the PNW. John Silas “Jack” Reed, a political journalist who’d come from a wealthy family in Portland’s Goose Hollow neighborhood during the late 19th century’s Progressive Era, reported on Soviet thought leaders like Leon Trotsky and became an adherent of their ideas.
But Reed was far from the only high-profile socialist in town — his early childhood was spent in the home of his grandmother Charlotte Green, a flamboyant socialite who’d leave the country whenever she was fed up with Portland’s “infamous political and artistic conservatism” (but who nonetheless contributed her cruller recipe to Portland’s first cookbook).
Reed was reared in the city and era of civil liberties lawyer and devout anarchist CES Wood; of Dr. Marie Equi’s radical feminist politics; of the New Thought journal penned by Lucy Mallory, the vegetarian wife of an Oregon congressman and daughter of the founder of Roseburg.
At the same time that the ideas of the Eurasian Steppe took hold in the PNW, so too did some of its cuisine. Cabbage roll recipes began popping up in “The Oregonian” seemingly out of nowhere — possibly due to the US’s own wartime rationing.
The dish is a cheap and filling way to stretch a pound of ground meat but is equally delicious with no meat at all (meatless versions are the standard for Sviata Vecheria, or Ukrainian Christmas Eve).
Taxonomically, golubtsy, holubtsi, holishkes and their many kin are types of dolma, though in Turkey (where the dish is assumed to have originated), there’s technically a difference between a dolma (a stuffed, hollowed-out vegetable or fruit) and sarma, where the stuffing is rolled up in an edible leaf.
Ottomans carried the dish throughout Western Asia, to the Balkans, Central Asia and Eastern Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries, when the empire controlled parts of southeastern Central Europe. This is also around the time that cabbage became a staple food of northern, central and Eastern Europe, which coincides with the use of cabbage leaves as the wrapper for the rolls.
Though rice and beef or pork are more typical fillings, I think kasha (buckwheat groats) is a better complement to venison and wild mushrooms — two superabundant Northwest ingredients that are right at home on a Slavic table, while exemplifying the intersection between the rural proletariat and urban bourgeoisie.
Makes 12-14 golubtsy.Note: Feel free to use ½ cup of dried mushrooms instead of fresh mushrooms; no need to rehydrate them first, but you should break them up into small pieces so they’ll roll without tearing the cabbage.
Ingredients
1 large head Savoy cabbageSauce1 tablespoon sunflower or vegetable oil,
1 medium carrot, shredded or finely diced, 1 celery rib, finely diced, ½ large white onion, diced, 2 cloves garlic, minced, 1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes plus ½ canful of water, 1 cup beef or chicken stock, 2 tablespoons brown sugar, 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar, 3 bay leaves, ½ teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon pepper, Sour cream and fresh chopped dill for serving.
Golubtsy filling
1 pound ground venison, beef or pork (or meatless ground beef), ½ large white onion, diced, ¼ pound mushrooms (preferably wild), chopped 1 cup uncooked kasha3 tablespoons chopped fresh dill (or 2 teaspoons dried dill, crushed), A few fat pinches of salt and pepper.Instructions
- Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Remove the core of the cabbage with a sharp knife, then boil the cabbage whole until it’s tender, 2-3 minutes. Remove the cabbage to a bowl or plate core side down, and allow it to drain and cool enough to handle.
- Preheat the oven to 350o.
- In a large saucepan or stove-safe casserole, heat the oil over medium heat. Cook the carrot, celery, onion and garlic, stirring occasionally until the vegetables begin to soften, about 6-8 minutes. Add the can of tomato sauce, then fill the empty can with water and add it to the pan along with the beef stock, brown sugar and vinegar. Add the bay leaves, salt and pepper and bring to a boil. Cover the pan, reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer the sauce while you assemble the golubtsy.
- In a large bowl, mix the golubtsy filling ingredients until thoroughly combined and set aside.
- Remove leaves of the cooked cabbage and select 12-14 large leaves that are pliable enough to roll but not overly soft. Remove the thick midribs (stems) using a paring knife and set the leaves aside. Finely dice the removed cabbage stems and add them to the sauce.
- Place a cabbage leaf on your work surface, then scoop a ¼-cup spoonful of the meat filling into the center, molding it into a little log. Fold the left and right sides of the cabbage leaf toward the center to cover the meat, then roll away from you to form a tight little package. Nestle the golubtsy in the sauce, seam side down, then repeat the process until you’ve used all the meat filling.
- Spoon sauce over the top of the golubtsy and return the lid to the saucepan. Slide the pan into the oven and bake until the meat and kasha are thoroughly cooked, about an hour.
