Fried Cabbage

History

In China's north, cabbage was for long stretches the only vegetable available through the winter, and home cooks developed quick, fuel-efficient ways to prepare it. The speed and simplicity of frying it — high heat, minimal fat, brief cooking — made it a mainstay of household kitchens across the northern provinces.

The recipe as printed in 1914 is brief: hot fat, cabbage washed, dried and cut in long slender strips, salt and pepper, and five minutes of stirring with the pan shaken to keep it from burning.

What the book adds is a sentence worth quoting exactly rather than paraphrasing. The dish, it says, "is used by the poor Chinese as a substitute for fish." That is the authors' period framing of class, not a description of a cuisine. Poverty is a material circumstance, not a culinary tradition, and the line reads more honestly as they wrote it than recast as timeless resourcefulness.

Two claims about the dish's longer history we could not stand behind: that stir-frying appears first in a sixth-century agricultural manual, and that Chinese cabbage did not reach Japan until the 1860s. Those we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• 1 head cabbage
• 2 tablespoons fat
• salt
• pepper

Instructions

1. Wash and dry the cabbage.
2. Cut the cabbage into long, slender strips.
3. Heat two tablespoonfuls of fat in a deep frying pan until hot.
4. Throw the cabbage strips into the hot fat.
5. Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste.
6. Fry for five minutes, stirring and shaking the pan frequently to keep the cabbage from burning.