mustard cabbage: the first indian dish you should make

move over, aloo gobhi

I’m appalled at how badly Indian cooking is taught. I’ve seen cookbooks begin by explaining a bunch of different spice mixes, each with 8 exotic ingredients. I’ve seen websites claim that “Indian chicken tikka masala” — something eaten exclusively in North American and European restaurants — is a good recipe for beginner cooks. No. These are recipes for disaster. This is pernicious pedagogy that prevents people from picking up Indian cooking. I struggle to empathize with people who think this is how we should teach beginners. Forget about scales, forget about mary had a little lamb, let’s go right to Rachmaninoff. No.

me struggling to make biryani. it would probably have helped to stay in the kitchen instead of playing piano while it cooked hmm

If you are a beginner then let me steer you away from this horror and show you a gentler path. You must begin by making mustard cabbage:

mustard cabbage

stuff
2tbsp vegetable oil
1tsp black mustard seeds
1/2 head cabbage
salt

tools
some kind of pan, it doesn't matter too much. Cast iron is great, any random frying pan is also great
spatula

what do
1. Shred the cabbage and have it ready to go. This is super important to do before you continue.
2. Heat the oil in a pan until it's shimmering. Test that the oil is hot enough by throwing in a couple mustard seeds. If they sizzle immediately, the oil is ready.
3. Throw in the mustard seeds and stir them around.
4. Wait for the seeds to sizzle, swell, and pop. Eventually some of them will start jumping out of the pan. This will happen really fast, in as little as 5 seconds, so be ready with the cabbage!
5. Dump in the cabbage and stir vigorously! It's super important to aggressively dump in the cabbage and mix it around once the seeds have started popping or else they will burn.
6. Let cook for a few minutes, stirring occasionally. Allow a little bit of browning to develop on the cabbage.
7. Add salt 1/2tsp at a time, stirring and tasting, until it's well seasoned. 

If I were running a normal food blog then I’d wax poetic about my childhood where I grew up eating this dish (which I did), and how I called my mom to get this recipe (also true), and how eating this reminds me of home (it does). But that’s a dumb waste of everyone’s time, so let’s talk about why this recipe works and why I picked this to be the starting point.

an accurate depiction of my childhood in india

why this recipe works

There are three sources of flavor here: aromatic oils in the mustard seeds; herbaceous compounds in the cabbage; and the browning of proteins and sugars in the cabbage.

Heating the mustard seeds in vegetable oil releases the flavored compounds inside the seeds. Some of them rise into the air, which is why you can smell them, but most of them are fat-soluble and go into the vegetable oil. This process is called tempering. The seeds have a small amount of water in them, which heats and becomes steam, resulting in the sizzling and the popping. Mustard seeds pop for the same reason that popcorn does: there’s a pocket of moisture trapped inside that gets hot, becomes steam, can’t escape and eventually forces its way out by blowing up the seed containing it.

Once they’re popping the mustard seeds are in grave danger of burning (because all the water is gone, fact 2 from the water post), which is why it’s so important to have the cabbage shredded and ready to go. Cabbage is mostly water (fact 4) so adding it to the pan instantly cools down the oil and mustard seeds (fact 3). But for this cooling to happen you actually need to stir cabbage into the oil and get the seeds distributed evenly. Otherwise you’ll have a layer of burning oil and seeds under a layer of relatively cold cabbage.

The cabbage cooks and releases water. This water contains herbaceous cabbage-y flavor compounds. The flavored oil and water coat the cabbage. The turgid, raw cabbage wilts under the action of heat. Upon further heating, the proteins and sugars in the cabbage undergo Maillard reactions to produce brown flavor compounds (melanoidins). Eventually, you mix in salt which allows eaters to actually taste all these flavors.

The mustard and cabbage flavors go particularly well together since they’re both brassicas. This connection probably wasn’t lost on the Punjabi farmers who invented this dish, but is perhaps less apparent to the Brooklyn hipster buying mustard seeds from Kalustyan’s and cabbage from the produce section at Whole Foods.

this hipster knows the evolutionary history of the brassicas

In summary: we create a flavored fat by heating mustard seeds in vegetable oil. We arrest their burning by dumping in shredded cabbage. We cook the cabbage until it’s soft and fragrant, then cook it some more to brown it. We salt it to make sure we can taste all those flavors.

why this is the best first thing to make

How do I love mustard cabbage? Let me count the ways.

It involves several essential skills without being overwhelming: testing that the oil is hot enough, tempering whole spices, knife skills, seasoning, browning, moisture awareness, and deciding when to stop cooking.

It uses just two ingredients besides salt and oil, and both of those ingredients are widely available in North American and European grocery stores (and probably those in other places? idk).

It’s super fast, like 15 minutes from beginning to end including the knife prep, so you can practice it a lot.

The ingredients stay good forever: mustard seeds last indefinitely in the pantry, and raw cabbage stays good in the fridge for a really long time without spoiling. So you can kinda just buy them and then practice this whenever you can fit it into your life.

The final result is yummy, so you get a real food reward.

It’s vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, has none of the eight major food allergens, and is not spicy. Pretty much everyone can eat this.

If you mess it up then it’s fine because the ingredients are cheap.

Cabbage is nutritious, filling and good for you.

a word on knife skills

It’s super important to develop knife skills, but I don’t really think it’s my comparative advantage to teach knife skills in this newsletter. This newsletter isn’t “everything I know about food”. It’s about the one thing where I think I have a uniquely developed opinion and feel compelled to add my voice: how to think about indian cooking in a systematic way so you can create freely.

So anyway go watch this video or google “how to shred cabbage” if you’re not quite sure how to do that, but please ask in the comments if you have questions!