History of Cabbage

Cabbage was probably domesticated later in history than Near Eastern crops such as lentils and summer wheat. Because of the wide range of crops developed from the wild B. oleracea, multiple broadly contemporaneous domestications of cabbage may have occurred throughout Europe. Non-heading cabbages and kale were probably the first to be domesticated, before 1000 BC, by the Celts of central and Western Europe. Unidentified brassicas type crops were part of the highly conservative unchanging Mesopotamian garden repertory.

It is believed that the ancient Egyptians did not cultivate cabbage, which is not native to the Nile valley, though a word shaw’t in Papyrus Harris of the time of Ramesses III has been interpreted as “cabbage”.  Ptolemaic Egyptians knew the cole crops as gramb, under the influence of Greek krambe, which had been a familiar plant to the Macedonian antecedents of the Ptolemies; by early Roman times Egyptian artisans and children were eating cabbage and turnips among a wide variety of other pulses and vegetables.

The ancient Greeks had some varieties of cabbage, as mentioned by Theophrastus, although whether they were more closely related to today’s cabbage or to one of the other Brassica crops is unknown. The headed cabbage variety was known to Greeks as krambe and to Romans as brassica or olus; the open, leafy variety (kale) was known in Greek as raphanosand in Latin as caulis. In the fourth century Diogenes ate nothing but cabbage and drank nothing but water, and Chrysippus of Cnidos wrote a treatise on cabbage, which Pliny knew, but has not survived. The Greeks were convinced that cabbages and grapevines were inimical, and that cabbage planted too near the vine would impart its unwelcome odor to the grapes; this Mediterranean sense of antipathy survives today. Brassica was considered by some Romans as a table luxury, but Lucullus considered it unfit for the senatorial table.  The more traditionalist Cato the Elder, espousing a simple, Republican life, ate his cabbage cooked or raw and dressed with vinegar; he said it surpassed all other vegetables, gave directions for its medicinal use, which extended to the cabbage-eater’s urine, in which infants might be rinsed approvingly distinguished three varieties.  Pliny the Elder listed seven, including Pompeii cabbage, Cumae cabbage and Sabellian cabbage.

According to Pliny, the Pompeii cabbage, which could not stand cold, is “taller, and has a thick stock near the root, but grows thicker between the leaves, these being scantier and narrower, but their tenderness is a valuable quality”. The Pompeii cabbage was also mentioned by Columella in De Re Rustica. Apicius gives several recipes for cauliculi, tender cabbage shoots. The Greeks and Romans claimed medicinal usages for their cabbage variety that included relief from gout, headaches and the symptoms of poisonous mushroom ingestion. The antipathy towards the vine made it seem that eating cabbage would avoid drunkenness. Cabbage continued to figure in the materia medica of Antiquity as well as at table: in the first century AD Dioscorides mentions two kinds of colewort’s with medical uses, the cultivated and the wild, and his opinions continued to be paraphrased in herbals right through the 17th century.

At the end of Antiquity cabbage is mentioned in De observatione ciborum of Anthemis, a Greek doctor at the court of Theodoric the Great, and cabbage appears among vegetables directed to be cultivated in the Capitulare de villis, composed c. 771-800 that guided the governance of the royal estates of Charlemagne. In Britain the Anglo-Saxon cultivated cawel. When round-headed cabbages appeared in 14th-century England they were called cabaches and caboches, words drawn from Old French and applied at first to refer to the ball of unopened leaves, the contemporaneous recipe that commences “Take cabbages and quarter them, and seethe them in good broth”, also suggests the tightly headed cabbage.

Manuscript illuminations show the prominence of cabbage in the cuisine of the High Middle Ages, and cabbage seeds feature among the seed list of purchases for the use of King John II of France when captive in England in 1360, but cabbages were also a familiar staple of the poor: in the lean year of 1420 the “Bourgeois of Paris” noted that “poor people ate no bread, nothing but cabbages and turnips and such dishes, without any bread or salt”. French naturalist Jean Ruel made what is considered the first explicit mention of head cabbage in his 1536 botanical treatise De Natura Stirpium, referring to it as capucos coles (head-coles), Sir Anthony Ashley, 1st Baronet, did not disdain to have a cabbage at the foot of his monument inWimborne St Giles.

In Istanbul Sultan Selim III penned a tongue-in-cheek ode to cabbage: without cabbage the halva feast was not complete. Cabbages spread from Europe into Mesopotamia and Egypt as a winter vegetable, and later followed trade routes throughout Asia and the Americas.  The absence of Sanskrit or other ancient Eastern language names for cabbage suggests that it was introduced to South Asia relatively recently. In India, cabbage was one of several vegetable crops introduced by colonizing traders from Portugal, who established trade routes from the 14th to 17th centuries. Carl Peter Thunberg reported that cabbage was not yet known in Japan in 1775.

Many cabbage varieties, including some still commonly grown, were introduced in Germany, France, and the Low Countries. During the 16th century, German gardeners developed the savoy cabbage. During the 17th and 18th centuries, cabbage was a food staple in such countries as Germany, England, Ireland and Russia, and pickled cabbage was frequently seen. Sauerkraut was used by Dutch, Scandinavian and German sailors to prevent scurvy during long ship voyages.

Jacques Cartier first brought cabbage to the Americas in 1541–42, and it was probably planted by the early English colonists, despite the lack of written evidence of its existence there until the mid-17th century. By the 18th century, it was commonly planted by both colonists and Native American Indians. Cabbage seeds traveled to Australia in 1788 with the First Fleet, and were planted the same year on Norfolk Island. It became a favorite vegetable of Australians by the 1830s and was frequently seen at the Sydney Markets.

There are several Guinness Book of World Records entries related to cabbage. These include the heaviest cabbage, at 57.61 kilograms (127.0 lb), heaviest red cabbage, at 19.05 kilograms (42.0 lb), longest cabbage roll, at 15.37 meters (50.4 ft), and the largest cabbage dish, at 925.4 kilograms (2,040 lb).  In 2012, Scott Robb of Palmer, Alaska, broke the world record for heaviest cabbage at 62.71 kilograms (138.25 lb).