Growing up, my great-grandmother Sylvia’s stuffed cabbage held an out-sized role in my culinary imagination. Born in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in 1899, Sylvia emigrated to Rochester, NY after WWI and later moved to the Jewish enclave in Miami Beach. Stuffed cabbage and other Ashkenazi recipes filled her new American homes. After her death, my mom treasured the hand-written recipe as a precious family heirloom. As a Jewish kid in rural Colorado, eating Sylvia’s stuffed cabbage made me feel connected to my heritage even as my broader cultural surroundings did not.
Kgbo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Stuffed cabbage is a simple food with a long history. At its most basic, it consists of cabbage leaves wrapped around a filling (usually meat) and boiled. There are countless variations across Europe, but Ashkenazi versions are typically cooked in a sweet-and-sour sauce. Sylvia’s recipe includes the basics of cabbage and meat, plus canned tomatoes, sauerkraut, and Heinz Ketchup. Why does my great-grandmother’s Old-World recipe include ingredients straight from industrial America? And how can a recipe far from “authentic” shtetl life make me feel so connected to my roots?
Jewish foodways underwent significant transformations in America. Early 20th century Jewish immigrants’ experience of American food was shaped by a conflict between the old and new, specifically between kosher laws and the novelty of American foods.1 By the WWI era when Sylvia arrived, adventurous Jewish women had begun cooking with canned goods, vegetable shortening, and yes, ketchup. In 1923, Heinz was the first major food corporation to obtain kosher certification.2 As a new immigrant, Sylvia probably insisted on Heinz ketchup because it was one of the only grocery-ready kosher ingredients that could replicate the sweet-and-sour flavors of Ashkenazi dishes.
Still from a newsreel detailing goings-on at the Heinz Convention in 1940, Conrad Poirier, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In America, Ashkenazi food’s distinct cultural heritage—shaped by dietary laws and food scarcity in Europe—was transformed by the “cultural sharing, blending, and innovation” that characterized turn-of-the-century immigrant foodways.3 Jewish immigrants largely “rejected the idea that back home foods tasted better and were more authentic,” according to historian Hasia R. Diner.4 For Sylvia, these industrial ingredients may have been bridges that connected her birthplace to her chosen homeland, recreating old flavors with new ingredients. We should be careful not to think of European versions as more “authentic” than the midcentury American recipes of our grandparents. After all, the Jewish diaspora has been adapting recipes for millennia.
Although Sylvia’s stuffed cabbage recipe may not have come straight from the shtetl, as a kid it represented an important connection to my culture and heritage. We lived far from family, and the local Jewish community consisted of one small congregation forty-five minutes away. Like the immigrants of Sylvia’s generation, my family used food as to link us to our heritage. When my mom would cook stuffed cabbage, her Miami Beach-NYC accent thickened as the pot bubbled on the stove, and her speech became peppered with Yiddishisms. She was back with her people. We may not have been a particularly observant family, but the cultural practice of cooking and eating these foods brought us in touch with our Jewishness.
Recipe: Great-Grandma Sylvia’s Stuffed Cabbage
Sylvia’s might not be the most gourmet version of Ashkenazi stuffed cabbage, but I guarantee it’s an authentic midcentury immigrant recipe that blends the tastes of home with the ingredients of a new life. She wrote this recipe down in the 1980s (having previously cooked it from memory for decades), so the quantities are not very precise; she recommends you “add until it’s enough.”
Ingredients
Green cabbage (1 large head or 2 small)
1 lb ground beef
2 slices white bread
1 onion, chopped
Oregano
1 10 oz. can tomato sauce
1-1.5 cups Heinz ketchup
1 16 oz. can tomatoes
1 16 oz. can sauerkraut
Sugar to taste
Salt to taste
Water
Raisins (optional)
Directions
- Separate cabbage leaves, boil till soft.
- Mix ground beef, white bread, onions chopped, oregano. Shape into oblong balls (2-3 inches), and wrap each ball in a boiled cabbage leaf.
- In a large pot, combine tomato sauce, tomatoes, and sauerkraut.
- Place small raw cabbage leaves on bottom of pot, place a layer of cabbage rolls, cover with ketchup, add layers of cabbage and ketchup, add raisins if using. Bring to boil, then reduce to simmer.
- Cover and cook on medium-low heat for 3 hours until done. Add water if necessary. Rolls should be covered with juices when cooking.
- Hasia R. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, & Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
- Jeffrey Yoskowitz, “American Processed Kosher,” Gastronomica 12, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 73.
- John Hoenig, Garden Variety: The American Tomato, From Corporate to Heirloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 97.
- Diner, 190.
