Emergency Cabbage!
A crisp, tart, cold salad to enliven you. Plus, a silky roasted side dish to soothe you.
FOOD MEMORIES ARE OFTEN THE WORST KIND OF LIARS. But it’s not their fault. They’re clouded by a special tenderness that our other basic needs—sleep, shelter, water, oxygen—rarely receive.
Only food becomes our rickety old wooden sled. And no matter how far away we get from childhood—how many starred restaurants we eat in, how adept we become at making a soufflé or executing a tricky knife skill, how high our culinary sophistication climbs—human beings will still expect awe from others when they offer up the recipe for their mother’s unbelievable, extraordinary pot roast. Which turns out to be the same pot roast that everyone’s mother made for them, but with more (or fewer) carrots.
And this absolute conviction that we were fed magic as children only gets stronger as the years go by.
For instance, all my siblings and I adored a congealed dessert-like salad my mother made with grape Jell-O, blueberry pie filling, canned pineapple, and a layer of sour cream blended with cream cheese in the middle. And so did a fancy New York City choreographer who came to stay at our house one year while he was working on South Pacific with my mother, who’d helped start a tiny community theatre straight out of Waiting for Guffman. He’d say, “Susan, when are you going to make that purple sh*t,” which is what we all started calling it, and she would make it.
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Decades later, in a fit of nostalgia for my strange, off-kilter childhood, I made a batch, too. I was immediately sure that I’d botched it. Had the quality of Jell-O changed? Were my blueberries bad? Had I left out an ingredient? It had felt fancy and rich and a little psychedelic back then—it was purple! Now it just seemed sweet and weird. A little bleh.
