Chou Rouge

Fall whispers in poetry and spice. Frankly, I love spice in my food anytime of year. But there's something about the colder, gloomier months that demands a few cloves, a cinnamon stick, and allspice berries. It veils the home in incense, steaming the windows in a kitchen's call to prayer.

The warm aura of spices also recalls rosy, if apocryphal, visions of the medieval England. Not the one with religious intolerance, indentured servitude, and syphilis. Instead, the bright technicolor image of Flynn's Robin Hood sipping mulled wine, snuggled up in some Sherwood Forest inn with Lady Marian.

I concluded a spicy, wine-borne treatment of red cabbage sounded like a delightful remedy to those stormy November doldrums. I stumbled upon Elizabeth David's "Chou Rouge Landais" in her seminal French Country Cooking.

Penned in early 1950's England (when they were just emerging from post-war diets of shoe leather sauteed in wood varnish), her recipes contain some oddities. In this particular recipe, I found the measurements unfamiliar. She calls for a gill of wine vinegar and 1/4 pint of red wine. As most of us would, I needed to look up "gill" in the dictionary, only to find out that it equals 1/4 pint. Why not use "gill" twice?

And, as my girlfriend instructed me, a pint equals about 2 cups. In other words, 1/2 cup of wine vinegar and 1/2 cup red wine. But that would have been far too easy.

Overall, I stuck close to the recipe, with a few notable exceptions. I omitted the suggested sausage/bacon, as I was practicing the veggie version for a potluck. Whereas I am an omnivorous wolf, I often break bread with my friends, among whom are gentle herb-eating lambs.

The recipe also called for dried orange peel, which appears in some markets in dubious quality and others not at all. I found some in a mccormic's jar for over 6 dollars. I will not pay 6 dollars for less than one orange worth of peel. I found it at the local Asian market, but they looked tired, shriveled, and half brown, like something you might have found under a park bench in August. So instead I used orange zest. Just a touch, mind you. Maybe 1/5th of the orange, but it did the trick rather nicely.

Lastly, the recipe called for herbs and seasoning, but did little to specify beyond mace and ground cloves. I threw in a light dusting of dried sage and rosemary.

David asks us to build up from the bottom of the casserole with alternating layers of cabbage, apples, onions, seasonings, and back again. In a horribly inefficient but monastic-like ritual, I prepared the seasonings separately for each layer. After layer one, I slivered a clove of garlic, grated some orange zest, sliced some red pepper, ground, shook and sprinkled the spices. Ad nauseam, five layers worth.

By the end, the casserole sported a purple dome of sliced cabbage, laid mosaic with apple slices, like some Byzantine temple. David writes "The aroma which emanates from this dish is particularly appetizing."

I invite you to close your eyes and swim in the miasma of the aforementioned contents, lazily braising in red wine and cider vinegar for 4 hours. If you've got that olfactory image, you've captured my idea of the smell of Autumn.
　
Here's the recipe for Chou Rouge Landais courtesy of Google Books. Enjoy!