Home Cooking from my Grandmother's Warm Yellow Kitchen

Passport & Plate - Smothered Cabbage with Pork

USA | Thursday, March 13, 2014 | 5 photos

Ingredients
For six to eight servings:
4 thick pork chops, bone in (Approximate weight 2 lb 10 oz or 1200g)
White vinegar (just a few tablespoons)
Sea salt flakes
Black pepper
Cayenne
Monosodium glutamate (optional) – my grandmother used something called Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer. I use MSG since none of us have a sensitivity to it.
2 heads cabbage – I use one normal cabbage and one savoy – total weight 7 3/4 bs or 3500g
1- 3 small red chilies – This is my addition. My grandmother would have seasoned this dish with cayenne and black pepper so if I don’t have fresh hot chilies, I do that instead.
2 large onions (Approximate weight 1 lb or 500g)
11 1/4 oz or 320g smoked slab bacon
Olive oil

 

How to prepare this recipe
Cut the bone off the pork chops, leaving on a little meat for those who like to chew the bones, by which I mean me, and cut the meat into chunks. Sprinkle with the vinegar and season with sea salt, black pepper, cayenne and, if desired, MSG. Put the pork into a bowl and stir so that all the pieces are well seasoned. Set aside to marinate.
Cut the bacon into chunks.
Core your cabbage and then slice finely. Set aside a couple of handfuls of the greenest pieces. Smothered cabbage may taste delicious but it’s not the prettiest dish. Adding some bright green at the end helps.
Slice your onions thinly and mince the red chilies.
In a big pot with a lid, heat a good drizzle of olive oil and pan fry the pork, including the bacon, a few pieces at a time. Remove them to a plate and keep pan frying until all the pork is caramelized.
Once the pork is done, add the sliced onions and chilies. Pop the lid on and let the onions sweat for a few minutes. Use a wooden spoon to scrape all the sticky brown bits off the pot.
When the onions are soft, add the pork back into the pot.
Right here I need to tell that my grandmother would have put all the cabbage in at once and cooked it till it was smothered down. I add mine in a bit at a time so that when the pork is tender, there is cabbage of varying degrees of doneness in the one pot, all the way from melted into almost nothing to still just a bit crunchy.

Add one third of the cabbage to the pot and put the lid back on. Simmer until the cabbage is wilted, about 20-25 minutes.
Give the whole thing a good stir. Add in another third of the cabbage. Simmer, covered, for another 20-25 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Finally, add in all but the couple of handfuls of the greenest cabbage leaves. Simmer, covered, for another 20 minutes.

Season with salt and black pepper to taste. Finally, add in the last green handfuls of cabbage and stir. Cook for just a few more minutes until those greens are slightly wilted but still a little crunchy.

 

The story behind this recipe
In southern Louisiana, we like to smother things. My mother says that growing up, she never had a crunchy vegetable. Green beans, cauliflower, broccoli, okra, eggplant, you name it, fresh from my grandfather's garden,it was cooked till soft and mushy. Now when she’s making maque choux, she cuts the fresh corn off the cob and barely introduces it to the heat and calls it done. I’m really not sure what my grandmother would think. We all think it’s very tasty.

My maternal grandmother was a woman who had it all, before we even knew what that looked like. She ran her own business with my grandfather, raised three girls, kept a tidy house and cooked a full meal for dinner (what she called the midday meal) every day of the week, with an extra dishes on Sunday. Their major appliance store was on Center St. in their small town and their house was right behind it. She’d nip away to get dinner started and leave a pot roast or round steak, smothered with onions, simmering on the stove while she attended to customers. She and my grandfather would close the store for dinner and open again after they had eaten and watched their stories, the TV soap operas. The characters on As the World Turns were part of daily life and their lives were discussed as if they were neighbors. They had been watching since 1956 so by the mid 1970s, when I started eavesdropping, the conversations were candid and alarming. John Dixon’s wife Kim wants to divorce him! He forced himself on her. Is it rape since he’s still her husband? This was pretty radical stuff for daytime television. Even my grandfather was hooked. If I sat quietly on the periphery, the grownups never even noticed me there, with wide eyes and bigger ears.

Anyway, the point of all this is that dishes that could simmer, covered, were easy favorites for a woman trying to run a store and cook a meal, and this cabbage with pork was no exception. It's comfort in a bowl, made with fresh ingredients, seasoned with salt and chilies and love.