ImageIf I were to make a list, in the manner of the medieval Japanese writer Sei Shonagon, of “Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster” — like a hint of cloud inside a mirror or raindrops chiming against the shutters — cabbage would not be top of mind. Yet here it is, this hardy vegetable that I have largely ignored my whole life, gently torn and given a simple anointing of sesame oil, garlic, black pepper and a fingerprint’s worth of salt. So few ingredients, so little time required, and I can’t stop eating it.
In Japan, the word for this is “yamitsuki”: addictive. A Japanese restaurateur once told me that addictive cabbage — perhaps as counterintuitive a union of words as “jumbo shrimp” to the average American — is the true test of any izakaya, where you go to drink as much as to eat. Cabbage is the first thing you order, he said, and if it’s good, you stay. You keep taking mouthfuls, to refresh the palate and ease the stomach between bites of the rich, fatty foods strategically served to whet your appetite for more liquor.
But addictive cabbage is a home dish too, a seemingly humble side that slyly steals all the glory. Aiko Cascio learned to make it from her grandmother as a child in Kagawa, a small prefecture on Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, in the wake of World War II. Her family shared the house with her aunts and uncles, and her grandmother needed her help in the kitchen because there were so many people to feed.
Still, many car shoppers are clearly convinced of the benefits. Sales of hybrid cars in the United States were up 33 percent from January through July compared to the previous year, accounting for 11 percent of new car sales, according to government data.
casino no depositRecipe: Yamitsuki (Addictive Cabbage)In 2014, a lifetime later, as a recent retiree living in Harlem, she saw a segment on Japanese TV about the League of Kitchens, an organization in New York that trains immigrant women to offer cooking classes in their homes, to empower members of sometimes-sidelined communities and preserve traditional knowledge. “I don’t want to be a lonely senior, sitting in the house,” Cascio remembers thinking.
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