November 23 2004, 08:03 PM To Bet Upon The Recipe

In a way, a recipe is an oracle. Gather close, she tells you. Bring me your sacrifices of butter and sugar and flour, offer me leavening, the dried seed of a rare orchid. Her scarf is soft against your cheek. Follow my whims, she says. When you are done with me (and I with you) your kitchen shall be full with the smells of heaven, and perfection on the counter. Her hand is warm. Follow me, she says, and you will have reward. The seduction of a recipe is the promise of a better future, one with something tasty in it.

Real recipes generally gloss over this. They are mechanistic. Here is your list of things, and please check it twice. Put this in here and that on thus. Set this for such and adjust the other to the middle of that. There is no room for a missed course, no mention of what happens from step to step. Makes two dozen.

I recently made cabbage soup; as above, cabbage soup is very simple. Brown 1/2 a pound of sausage in a little oil in a large pot. Clean, core, and shred one head of cabbage. From the pot, take out the sausage, and add the cabbage, with a scattering of salt. Add a cup or two of stock to the cabbage. Slice the sausage, and add it back to the pot. Add some water. Cover and simmer until done, an hour or two. Serve hot. Makes 12 servings. Salt to taste.

To the above, I can add some advice.

Seek good sausage. If you have the luxury of a local butcher who knows their salt, be their patron. Get to know them, and make them give you the best sausage they can muster. My grandmother had an old world butcher two blocks from her home, and we never ate better sausage then that sausage (the fresh quality lard was also the reason her pastry was so good). Owing to the nature of cabbage, I would recommend a sausage that is seething with fennel, if you can find it, but most any good sausage will do wonderfully well. Using more sausage than the recipe calls for is never a mistake. Make sure it gets good and brown, and leaves all sorts of brown bits all over the bottom of the pan.

Seek good cabbage. Find a farm market, or a farm. Buy it in season. Look for tight leaves, and good weight. It should chop up crisp and wet. Note that it will expel a good seal of liquid as it cooks. Note, too, that at some point in the cooking the pot will emit terrible, terrible smells. They will clatter and crawl from beneath the lid, and sour the lemon balm on the sill, and scare the cat. This will be all right; the cabbage will then turn sweet, sweet.

If you like, caramelize onions with the sausage. Use more stock than water for a heartier soup. Use red cabbage or green. Add garlic, or more crushed fennel or cumin seeds, or hing. It is hard to beat it up so badly that it is no longer good to eat, if you're careful.

Serve by the lit wick of a tall candle, in a wide bowl on a winter's night. Eat with a favorite spoon. Go back for seconds. Enjoy.