I remember the first time my Nana made this recipe for me, I was in heaven. It was SO GOOD. It's full of warm and yummy tomato which is cooked for several hours until it just absorbs all the best flavors. I could never eat just one bowl of it so, My Mom would have my Nana make extra and freeze it in quart-sized bags to take back to college with us to eat on cold nights!
I've been stewing on the nature of passing along recipes, now that we have the internet we all just pin the recipes we like and link it to a blog post and kind of move on with it, but back in the 50's and 60's that wasn't a thing, you would go to a dinner party or have a friend mention a lovely recipe somebody else gave them and you'd write it down and hand it to a friend. The result was the name of the recipe change over time. My grandmother had this recipe in her records as "Kayla's" cabbage patch stew (my Mom). I didn't think anything of it. When I gave the cookbook to my mom's mom, my Nana, my Nana laughed at it and said that the recipe didn't come from my mom, it had come from one of her old friends, a woman named Marion. Nana had gotten the recipe from her, and my Mom had made it for my Grandmother so it just became Kayla's cabbage patch stew! There's something so neat about thinking about that process and how people interacted back then, I can just picture it all.
We always make cabbage patch stew for New Year's Day because it's chock full of cabbage which traditionally you eat for money! The recipe calls for a can of pinto beans which you add in the last thirty minutes, but if your family is anything like mine, then you can skip the beans if you want!
The recipe calls for stewed tomatoes, but we couldn't find any traditional stewed potatoes in the store so we got some Mexican stewed potatoes. It turned out great, it had a nice little bit of extra seasoning, but not too much.
Another option for the tomatoes is to buy some petite diced stewed tomatoes or to put the regular stewed tomatoes in the food processor and pulse a bit, the only real benefit to doing this is it makes the bites a bit more manageable--otherwise the stewed tomatoes can get a bit big!
Otherwise this dish is super super easy to make (not that any of the stuff I just typed would make the dish hard). I rough cut the cabbage, I don't get very in my head about making anything look particularly uniform-- and it's cabbage, so I just chop it until it looks like the pieces seem mostly reasonable. Then all you have to do is dice the onion and you're basically done with the prep!
Then brown the hamburger meat, I'm sure you know how to do that, but I just put it in a pan and break it apart and mush down on it until it's all brown. Then drain it when it's done!
Go find your biggest pot you own. No, not that one, the bigger one. That's right, that one. And put everything in the pot, except the beans. The order doesn't really matter, but I typically put the meat in the bottom, then the onion, sugar and vinegar (and I usually use apple cider vinegar, but whatever you have around works) followed by all the cans of stewed tomatoes and ro-tel tomatoes and top it off with the cabbage.
Once everything is together bring it to a boil then reduce it to a simmer for an hour-and-a-half. If you want to add beans, add the beans after the hour-and-a-half and cook for another 30 minutes. If you don't want to add beans I cook for an extra 15 minutes, though it's realistically not necessary.
I put it in my biggest pot and the cabbage is just so overwhelming that it doesn't fit. So I spend about the first 15 - 20 minutes staring the mixture to bring the cabbage to the bottom so it'll cook down and cook down it will. I mostly leave it alone while it's cooking, but I try to stir it every time I walk by or think about it.
When the time is up, it's ready to eat! Serve it up and eat it hot! Enjoy it with some yummy cornbread to make it the perfect winter feast.
Happy New Year, I hope this year is all that you want it to be. Thank you for reading and enjoying these posts from my Grandmother.
CABBAGE PATCH STEW
Kayla
SERVES: 6 | PREP TIME: 10 MINUTES | COOK TIME: 2 HOURS
1 head of cabbage
1 cup onion, chopped
1 ½ lbs. hamburger
4 cans (14 oz.) stewed tomatoes
10 oz. can Rotel tomatoes
1 Tbsp. vinegar
1 tsp. sugar
14 oz. can pinto beans
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Cut cabbage into bite sized pieces. Chop the onion.
2. Brown hamburger meat and drain.
3. Combine all ingredients except beans in a large pan with 1 or 2 cups of water. Simmer 1 hour and 30 minutes.
4. (optional) Add beans and simmer 30 more minutes.
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