How the humble cabbage got this P.E.I. woman a shout out in the New York Times

Cabbage is “a little gift” from the universe that far too many Canadians are overlooking, according to a P.E.I. woman who created a cabbage cookbook out of the pandemic lockdowns.

“It’s both sweet and a little acidic. It tastes good on your tongue. It’s cheap. It’s full of vitamins,” said Ann Thurlow, a retired CBC broadcaster and writer in Charlottetown.

“What’s there not to love about the cabbage? It’s the most perfect vegetable,” she told The Current’s Matt Galloway. 

During the height of COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, Thurlow heard that P.E.I’s largest cabbage farm had a massive surplus due to restaurant closures.

She started the P.E.I. Cabbage Club on Facebook, gathering and sharing recipes to encourage her fellow islanders to buy and cook the vegetable at home. The group attracted more than 800 followers.

She also made a point of reaching out to newcomers on P.E.I. — gathering recipes from the Afghan community, Indian community, and even some Buddhist nuns — to showcase the Island’s growing diversity. 

People have bad memories of … poorly cooked cabbage, steamed into submission in their childhoods.– Sam Sifton

The result is My PEI Cabbage Cookbook, a collection of recipes alongside profiles of some local cabbage farms, essays by fans of the vegetable, and illustrations by Rebecca Ford.

Proceeds from the book initially went towards stocking a free pantry, providing essentials to people in need. Now it goes to a shelter for homeless women.

Asked for her favourite recipes, Thurlow recommends chopping cabbage into centimetre-sized chunks, then slow cooking it in a pan for about 30 minutes until it caramelizes, and adding a little white wine and butter. 

“I said to my husband, ‘If I would serve this in a restaurant and the price was $24, I would go, that’s $24 well spent,'” she said.

Another favourite is to chop a cabbage into quarters and roast it for 30 minutes, with “a whole bunch of olive oil on it — and garlic salt, if you’re feeling a little racy.”

She thinks people will go out of their way and spend a lot of money to buy trendier ingredients, “but they will rush by the cabbage at the grocery store” which is “way less expensive, way more versatile.”

“It’s one of those things I just don’t get, so I thought I would try to give the cabbage a little boost,” she said.

Little did she know, her efforts would make it all the way to the pages of The New York Times.

‘Strange and idiosyncratic’

One day, Thurlow saw a cabbage recipe in The New York Times, courtesy of Sam Sifton, the founding editor of the New York Times Cooking website.

“I admire him tremendously, like, probably immodestly … and I thought, ‘I’m going to send him a cookbook,'” she said. She included a note that read, “I hear you like cabbage.”

At most, Thurlow hoped for an email in response, but nothing was immediately forthcoming.

“But all of a sudden, one day I woke up from a nap, truthfully, and my email was just flooded with people going ‘Sam Sifton mentioned your cookbook in his column,’ and I was just floored,” she said.

“He found it strange and idiosyncratic, and apparently that’s good.”

Sifton told The Current that he shares Thurlow’s love for cabbage, but many people don’t see its potential. 

“People have bad memories of cabbage, perhaps — poorly cooked cabbage steamed into submission in their childhoods — and those memories linger on,” said Sifton, an assistant managing editor responsible for the Times’ culture and lifestyle coverage.

“The fact of the matter is that once you cook with it, you’re like, ‘Wow, this is a versatile vegetable.'”

He thinks that restaurant closures during the pandemic brought some people back to cooking, and to “the balm that is a home-cooked meal.” 

“That joy translated into a kind of confidence that allowed them to spread their wings and try new recipes and discover new flavours.” He hopes the trend continues.

Sifton mentioned the book in his column, What to Cook Right Now, with a link to the only place he could find it online: Veseys, a P.E.I.-based seed seller that sells the book for Thurlow.

Soon after, the company called her in a panic because the book was selling out fast.

“They were just freaking out because they needed to have more cookbooks. I was freaking out because I couldn’t believe what had happened. The printer was freaking out because I was yelling at them,” Thurlow said.

“It was just like, a little mini P.E.I. explosion over here.”

Thurlow said that putting the book together has brought her a lot of happiness, and connected her to people — like Sifton — that she might not otherwise have met.

“I’m a big fan of promoting the underdog,” she said.

“There could be nothing ‘underdoggier’ than the cabbage.”