I was last-Tuesday-years-old when I learned that brassicas are effective phytoremediators. I suppose I should have deduced this from all the mustard that grows lushly on Superfund sites, enlivening the soil after we’ve made our messes and left the locals for dead. But I never made that connection. I also never noticed that, as I’ve aged, cabbage has increasingly tasted odd, metallic and chemical odd, not cabbage odd. And it has increasingly messed up my digestive tract. I blamed that on age… and cabbage… but now I think the environment of cabbage is more to blame.
I have never grown much cabbage. Out in the desert, it’s sort of pointless. There are better things to do with your limited water budget. There are other options for winter nutrition. I could grow endive and arugula and lettuce year round in an enclosed greens tub that lived in the shade of my elder and roses. I needed to keep it covered sometimes, more to protect it from dehydration, but only a few nights a year would frost-kill the leafy veg. So cabbage was superfluous.
I also have never had a place to store cabbage. I had one cabinet to house all the preserved food and no place to ferment stuff except the kitchen counter. Again, there were better options for that space.
And maybe most importantly, aside from red cabbage on fish tacos and spring rolls now and then, I could never convince my family to eat cabbage. One jar of sauerkraut a year would be about all I could expect to serve them without mutiny. In fact, they weren’t keen on most of the brassicas, broccoli and spinach being the exceptions. I never did get them to eat kale. Radishes were touch and go (but then radishes in the desert are typically not great). Cauliflower was right out even if I drenched it in korma sauce. My sons sort of like beets and beet greens were acceptable in salads or quiche. Nobody likes turnips. Heck, I don’t even like most turnips — though I do like a well-roasted rutabaga in winter stews or shredded into the potato pancake batter. So I grew a few brassicas and relied on the farmers’ markets for most of the little that we ate.
Hence it was not until I moved to a Massachusetts farm and started growing brassicas heavily that I noticed that cabbage tasted funny, funnier than I remember it anyway.
My farm was a former sheep farm on a hillside, down-slope from a well-traveled paved country road, the shortcut from the high school to the town center. Road run-off ran down the short incline and right into my veg garden. My plants breathed in black truck exhaust every day. And the guy across the road had many hobbies that involved foul smells and oozing fluids. Plus, Massachusetts is downwind from the Rust Belt. By the 60s and 70s, acid rain was so bad in New England that building stone and gravestone had to be protected or re-cut. Emissions regulation had some positive effect (though I think we all know that the reduction was less due to industry following those regulations than running away from them by offshoring manufacturing). But there is still enough extra gunk in the rain to damage sensitive foliage and leave a tang in your mouth after drinking it. (Though New England water has all sorts of problems besides acid rain, and I wouldn’t drink it…)
Summing all that up, this means that my garden was marinating in all sorts of nastiness, probably in levels that fell just shy of EPA warnings. I only tested the soil once, concerned more about fertility than poison, so I didn’t look too closely at the heavy metals. (I mean, it was a farm in the middle of nowhere. It took twenty minutes of driving in any direction to get to a highway.) There were no red numbers on the results, but there were also not many “too little to detect”. And of course, a soil test doesn’t measure what doesn’t make it to the soil, like most car exhaust. Or chemicals taken up by plants and then removed when humans eat those plants.
And apparently toxic sludge is a brassica’s cocktail of choice.
I don’t think the roots are as affected, and most of what I grew were roots. Plants tend not to store superfluous stuff in their roots. That gets concentrated in the leaves which are temporary and can be shed if the superfluous stuff turns out to be deadly. So the beets and radishes were probably fine. I didn’t notice any change in taste, in any case, nor an increase in digestive problems from them. But cabbage and kale? Yuck. My formerly well-loved cabbage-cheese soup smelled terrible and could mess up the intestines for a week. And it wasn’t just my cabbage and kale. The rest of the growers at the Saturday market had largely rotten egg cabbage and metallic kale too.
And still… I just thought my tastes had changed. Or my body had aged. Or I had painted cabbage a bit rosier in memory than it deserved. I didn’t even consider that the cabbage was, in fact, changed.
But last week I was reading an essay on bucket gardening by Diana Rajchel in Llewellyn’s 2024 Herbal Almanac. Naturally, most of the buckets in use were plastic, and because bucket gardening is usually the cheap and dirty option, the buckets were mostly the ubiquitous five-gallon things that hardware stores use for branding — in other words, not food safe plastic. Her kids noticed the taste first, balking at bucket spinach when they used to eat spinach without complaint (if not necessarily with enthusiasm). They said it tasted like metal. Which is exactly what I taste when I eat New England leafy brassicas — and increasingly leafy brassicas from anywhere else.
When I went to the Midwest last summer for a family funeral, there was kale. I don’t know where it came from. Probably California. But it tasted just as weird as the taste I’d grown to think of as “New England kale”. Worse, in fact. And yet… I still didn’t blame the brassicas.
But Rajchel points out that brassicas are very good at sucking up petrochemicals. Indeed, they love toxins of all kinds, and they store up all that glop in their leaves, where much it will eventually be broken down by microbes or released into the atmosphere when the leaves rot. I don’t know what the plant gets out of this, nor how brassicas got so good at it so very quickly. Petrochemicals have not been around for long. It only took a blink of the eye in evolutionary time to develop this skill. Perhaps these plants have always sucked up whatever nastiness was hanging about in the soil, so that their leaves would be unpalatable and therefore left alone by browsers. When humans introduced plastics the brassicas probably rejoiced. Finally, something even the deer won’t touch! But no such luck… and, even though cabbage became far worse than just cabbage, we kept eating the foul leaves and thinking we just didn’t remember cabbage properly… because, you know, it’s cabbage, so…
Rajchel’s bucket garden cabbage has to be grown in food-safe buckets now, and even this probably doesn’t make it taste much better. But it might make it less hard on the belly. My farm cabbage was definitely harder on the belly the closer it got to the road. A bit more separation from the black trucks made a big difference for many of the leafy plants, including my herbs. However, my current veg garden is on a quarter acre hillside right in the middle of town, right on a heavily-trafficked road that gets so heavily salted it looks white all year. It is up a short, but steep, incline from the road, so most run-off will go around the veg plot (mostly into my garage). But I’m sure there are not particularly salubrious elements in the soil, as well as car exhaust taken up by the greens.
I have planted a hedge of willow on the road, and I grow most of the greens in my little cold frame by the kitchen door. But I can’t fit cabbage in the cold frame and the willows are still young, not much protection. There have been brassica greens grown in the veg garden since I moved here. And I haven’t much liked them. Moreover, they haven’t liked me. And now, I know that it’s not the brassica greens. Well, it is, but it’s not the inherently brassica-ness — it’s their fondness for toxic sludge.
My garden is somewhat urban (smallish urban, anyway), but it is not particularly soaked in petrochemicals relative to the industrial agriculture that produces most of the leafy brassicas for sale in the grocery store. So it makes sense that my cabbage tastes a bit better than the stuff shipped in from California and sold in Midwest markets. (Even in the summer…) And the cabbage that comes from industry is coated — intentionally so — with chemicals that are far more disagreeable than car exhaust and road salt. So it stands to reason that the stuff sold in supermarkets is going to taste terrible and then turn your belly inside out — if you manage to eat it at all.
But the result of putting all this together is that I just can’t bring myself to grow leafy brassicas in the veg garden any more. I may not be at risk of reproductive or developmental damages at this stage of my life, but I think digestive chaos and foul taste are reason enough to stop ingesting it. However, I have all this seed. Also, in my cold climate, brassicas are one of the easiest foods to grow and store — with little energy use! Kale can just sit out there in the garden all winter long, for nutritious greens as long as you can find them under all the snow. In fact, kale tastes better and has a more pleasant texture after it has frozen a few times. It needs cold. And when it has cold, it will pretty much grow itself. This is the perfect veg as far as I’m concerned. Or would be if it didn’t taste like rusty swamp water.
So I have bought a few more raised bed kits, and these will live on the house lot which is well above the road and rather insulated from the exhaust by wide beds of perennials and shrubs. I haven’t tasted car exhaust on my raspberries which grow on this side of the street, and raspberries taste like whatever falls on them. So I think the brassicas will be safe.
I will not be growing as much of them. I will probably be doing many rounds of small successive sowings for the leafy things. I might only grow a couple cauliflower and broccoli plants, just for a treat. And this might be the last year that I grow those space-hog veggies that don’t store well without brine or freezing. To be honest, I’m beginning to question storing brassicas in the freezer at all. My plastic is theoretically food safe and chemicals are not much taken into the plant after it is harvested, but who knows how much is sitting on the surface after a year of sitting in close contact with the freezer container. And anyway, I should just get used to not using plastic or freezing to store food, as those will be unreliable in the not so distant future. I guess, the point is that plastic is already unreliable…
So… the garden plan is changing ad hoc. This is why I don’t invest much emotion into my garden plans. I like to draw it all out and dream about flowers and food and herbs. But I don’t worry when something comes along and up-ends the whole thing. Because it will. It might be a groundhog with an insatiable bean craving. It might be a catastrophic flood. It might be learning that the funny taste in the cabbage is not only a real thing but might actually be poisonous. But something will happen and all the plans will be scuppered.
I guess this makes planning more fun actually. I am free from fault when things go wrong. Also there are many more plans made each year, rather than the one-and-done that is the “proper” method of planning. I can be inventive and clever and adaptable. This sort of thing makes me happy. So…
I’m building some new beds and dreaming about brassica greens that taste like… brassica greens. Which is maybe not good… but it’s certainly not bad.
This past weekend I did not cook cabbage. Nor any other brassicas. I made goat cheese and sweet potato soup and walnut-onion bread. Vastly superior in all ways! Let me show you…
For the bread…
I used my usual Dutch oven bread recipe: 2 cups sourdough starter, 2 cups bread flour, 1 cup whole wheat flour, 1 tsp salt, 1/2 cup warm water. To this I added 4 Tbs each of maple syrup and walnut oil. There was some adjustment of the flour for these extra liquids, but it didn’t amount to more than a quarter cup of additional bread flour. Just make a dough that feels right to you.
I prepared the dough in the evening and let it ferment overnight.
The next morning, I finely chopped a smallish onion and about 1 1/2 cups of walnut pieces. I sautéed the onion in olive oil, and when the onion was translucent, I added the walnuts to brown them a bit with the onions.
I folded the onion and walnuts into the fermented dough. This is when I added the extra flour. The resulting dough was a bit soft, but not too sticky. For those who like to test elasticity, this dough will fail the window-pane test because of all the stuff that’s in the dough. Just trust the dough.
When it was the right texture, I folded the dough into a ball.
I lined a mixing bowl with slightly dampened parchment paper. Then I placed the dough into the bowl and covered it with a damp basket-weave kitchen towel.
I put my cast iron Dutch oven in the oven and preheated the oven to 425°F, placing a shallow pan of water in the oven to add humidity to the heat. Then I set the bowl of dough on top of the warm oven to rise.
After maybe 30 minutes, I sliced a cross into the top of the loaf. This is normally done to let excess gas escape so you don’t have enormous air pockets in your bread. But in this case I just did it to look pretty and add edge effects to the crust.
When the loaf had a bit more than doubled, I transferred the dough, still in its parchment paper sling, to the hot Dutch oven. This keeps the bread from burning, and it also makes clean-up much easier.
I left the lid off the Dutch oven and baked the bread uncovered at 425° for 25 minutes, making sure that the pan of water in the oven was full and steaming.
Then I turned the heat up to 500°F and removed the pan of water. I replaced the Dutch oven lid and baked the bread covered for about 45 minutes. You may not need that much time. My oven takes a long time to add additional heat at those high temperatures and doesn’t hold its temperature very efficiently either.
When the bread was browned — in fact, blackened a little, because of the syrup in this recipe — I turned the loaf out of the hot pan onto a cooling rack, testing for doneness by thumping the bottom of the bread.
I then exercised a remarkable degree of self-restraint by not immediately slicing into this divinely scented loaf of bread. Instead, I waited for it to cool and thereby finish developing its crumb (the interior texture — which does not finish baking solid until the loaf is at room temperature… which is, happily, also when you can eat it without burning your mouth…)
With the oil and syrup in this recipe, you do not need spread anything on the bread. But I put some fig preserves on one slice — pure decadence! It also makes fine toast. I suspect it might be perfect for toasted cheese sandwiches, with a bit of cheddar or smoked gouda or something similarly robust. Maybe even blue cheese for those who like that sort of thing. (I have a penicillin allergy; blue cheese doesn’t trigger an allergic reaction, but my body doesn’t like it much all the same… also… it smells like adolescent gym class… just saying…)
This bread also pairs well with soup, especially the soup I made expressly for this bread.
For the soup…
I roasted four large sweet potatoes until they pretty much peeled and mashed themselves. I let them cool overnight, and this morning I dumped them in a mixing bowl.
Then I added about 10 oz of soft goat cheese and the cloves from a small peeled bulb of garlic. I puréed all this together with my immersion blender.
I finely chopped three small onions and about 12 roasted green chile pods and sautéed this veg in olive oil.
My spice mix was generous spoonfuls each of cumin, allspice, rubbed sage and thyme.
When the onions were translucent and the spices all smelled good, I added the cheese and sweet potato mixture, then poured in a couple quarts of veg stock and stirred it all well.
I brought this gloopy mix to a low boil, stirring frequently. As soon as it started looking like a volcanic mud pit, I took it off the high heat and put it on another heating element set to the lowest setting, letting the soup slowly cook for a couple hours.
Meanwhile, I toasted a week’s worth of walnuts to serve on top of the soup and set these aside in a covered bowl.
This soup is thick enough to be a meal in itself. But its flavor and texture would serve as an excellent sauce on cheese ravioli or over rice. I might try one of these later this week. For the first night, I just served it as soup with walnuts on top and a slice of onion walnut bread on the side. I didn’t even need a spoon, just scooped up the thick soup with the bread. MMMmmm!
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 
I have learned a lot from this piece – thank you.
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