Cabbage and Mince (Eesti toit)

I've been hankering for cabbage and mince for a while now.

It's hard to explain it, but I have some sort of deep memory of this dish - like I ate it once a long time ago and can no longer remember where, when or under what circumstances.

I expect my grandmother probably made it once.  She made cabbage rolls on more than one occasion.  My grandmother left Estonia when she was a child, and the only part of her culture she really kept was the food she made on special occasions.  Sauerkraut and skumbria, mainly, but occasionally cabbage rolls and brawn (we never called it "head cheese", and I refuse to).

My mother was never keen on cabbage rolls, so actively avoided encouraging the combination of cabbage and mince.  I made them once, under my grandmother's guidance, and realised that the amount of work involved wasn't worth it just for the delicious goodness of combining cabbage and mince.

Some time ago I bought a dual-language Estonian cookbook, and one of the recipes was for cabbage and mince.  I filed it away in the "I must try to make this" compartment of my brain.

Well, recently I've just been craving the dish.  I have no idea why, but something deep inside me has been saying "do you know what would be awesome?  Cabbage and mince."

So I rustled up a couple of different recipes, and sort of weaved a path between them that struck a balance between "tasty" and "lazy".

The results?  Good, wholesome food.  It really is awesome.  Plain, simple, yet tasty, and with a goodness that warms you from the inside out.  It honestly seemed like I've been eating this stuff my whole life.

And I fed it to my mother and she didn't hate it.  That's a success in anyone's books.

I think my grandmother would have enjoyed it, and it's a shame I didn't try making this years ago.

The recipe I cobbled together from a few different ones was as follows:

400g lean mince
1 onion, cut in half and thinly sliced
2 carrots, coarsely grated
1/2 a large head of cabbage, thinly sliced
beef stock (I used a heaped teaspoon of Bonox, but a crumbed stock cube would work)
Salt and pepper to taste
Cup of hot water
Bit of oil for browning the meat 

I also added about 100g of diced bacon, because one of the recipes I'd seen in the past had asked for a mixture of pork and beef mince, and my mother seemed more likely to eat it if the bacon was involved. 

Cook the cabbage in a pot with the cup of hot water, being careful not to overcook it. 

Meanwhile, in a deep frying pan, fry the onions and meat until the onions are soft and the meat is completely browned, then add the carrots and seasoning with a little bit of water to dissolve the stock.  Stir through, then add the cooked cabbage to the meat (including the water in the pot) and stir through.  

Cook for another ten minutes until the cabbage has infused with the flavours of the pan and the liquid has reduced. 

Serve with boiled potatoes and rye bread.

Fancy Sausage Jellyfish?

So, I was having had a deep and meaningful conversation with my peers on the sausage jellyfish front and we've decided it could totally be jazzed up a bit.

So here we go:

Fancy-pants Sausage Jellyfish

Ingredients:

• Chorizo sausages, sliced into 1.5 - 2cm long pieces
  
• Quick-cook Spaghetti
  
• Four very ripe tomatoes
  
• Two tablespoons olive oil
  
• One small-to-medium onion
  
• 2 Cloves garlic
  
• One tub of tomato puree
  
• Half-cup of red wine
  
• Water
  
• Salt, Pepper and Soy Sauce (optional), to taste.
  
• Two large handfuls of spinach

Method:

Break strands of spaghetti in half and insert approximately 8 half-strands into one side of the chorizo pieces, as legs for the jellyfish. Bring a pot of water to boil while cooking the sauce.

Dice onion and crush garlic, then saute in olive oil until tender. Add tomato puree and wine, then enough water to turn into a thin sauce. Roughly chop tomatoes and add to sauce. Add salt, pepper and soy sauce to taste.

Meanwhile, add chorizo and spaghetti to the boiling water and cook according to the directions on the spaghetti package. Leave in the water until ready to serve.

When the "jellyfish" are cooked, take sauce off heat and quickly toss through the washed spinach leaves. Quickly drain the jelly-fish and divide between plates, pour the source over the "fish" and serve immediately.


Now to answer a few questions:

• No, I haven't tried this myself. Well, I have, but I haven't. I've used the chorizo in the sauce, which I have used with actual spaghetti. So I have eaten all of these ingredients together in the same meal, and found them to be tasty and not horrible. I haven't done the thing with the jelly-fish, and I've never tried quick-cook spaghetti.
  
• I will grant that soy sauce isn't a "typical" ingredient in tomato-based spaghetti sauces, but it's quite nice. Trust me. In my family we never make bolognese without it. This is partly because my grandmother used to add soy sauce, tomato sauce and Worcestershire sauce to everything - which is either incredibly odd or very cosmopolitan, depending on how you look at things.

Neenish Tarts

It's about this time of year that I start having strange discussions with people regarding neenish tarts.

For one thing, there's something about the name "neenish tarts" that just lends itself to strange discussions. It seems vaguely nonsensical in a quaint, nostalgic kind of way - almost like you'd expect it to turn up in a verse by Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll:

The Queen of Hearts ate Neenish Tarts
While the fimble-bamp played the bamzoo
And down by the sea danced the quirrelly-quee
With a snake and a grey kangaroo

For another thing, it seems the country can be sharply divided into those who know what a neenish tart is, and those who don't.

People who know what a neenish tart is (usually from the southern states) regard them as a fairly boring, run-of-the-mill bakery item which can be found in any average bakery or cake display. The tarts are so ubiquitous and "standard" in certain states that these people don't even notice that they can't be found north of certain parts of New South Wales. When travelling north it doesn't even occur to them to look for neenish tarts in, say, Queensland, so they are always rather surprised if you point out that we don't usually have them. In fact, we don't usually know what they are.

The people who don't know what a neenish tart is (usually from the northern states) are the most peculiar part of this dichotomy, because they often refuse to believe that such a thing exists. I have had many a dubious Queenslander look at me as if I had flown off my rocker when I try to explain what neenish tarts are. I think it might have something to do with the name sounding so quaint and odd, something to do with the contents of the tarts (why would anyone want a tart filled with mock cream?) and something to do with the fact that I often start my explanation with the phrase "it's a classic Australian pastry..."

People who have lived in Australia all their lives find it difficult to accept that something can be a "classic Australian" anything if they've never heard of it. Because the contents of our grocery stores is so surprisingly uniform across such a vast space, it occasionally misses our attention that we do have regional variations. For example, if you went to a deli in Queensland you would find cocktail sausages are referred to as "Cheerios", while the same meat product in South Australia would be called "little boys" (something I personally find a bit disturbing).

So I have to explain to the disbelieving northerners that neenish tarts are, in fact, unique to Australia. There are two legends about how they came to be. The first is that a humble housewife invented them for a Country Women's Association do some-time back in the 1950s. The other is that they were created by a woman who owned a bakery and tried to remember some of the recipes her family used to make back in Germany, but ended up producing something with a uniquely Australian twist.

(I love the phrase "uniquely Australian twist" - it implies we have enough of a widely applicable culture to be able to recognise when something is particularly "us", when we all know Australia hasn't had anything resembling a unifying cultural identity since we noticed the White Australia Policy was a bad idea, our cultural cringe kicked into overdrive and we started making a conscious effort to forget anything ever done by British descendants between the years 1770 and 1980. The joy of modern Australian culture is that it isn't really any thing at all - a multiculture is not, and really cannot ever be, a single culture. Unless we use it to hunt marsupials, I'm not sure how "uniquely Australian" a pastry can be).

So, what is a neenish tart? Well, it's a small tart, lined with jam and filled with mock cream, then topped with duo-tone icing - one half is chocolate, the other half is either vanilla or white chocolate. What does it taste like? Fairly unimpressive, actually. The problem with mock cream is that it can be good, but most of the time it's pretty average. Thus a tart which consists of mock cream and jam can have some drawbacks.

If anyone's interested, you can find a fairly decent recipe for neenish tarts here. The recipe forgets to add the jam, though, so for a true neenish tart experience you'll have to remember to drop about a teaspoon of pink jam into each tart case before adding the mock cream.

Why do I find myself having conversations about neenish tarts at this time of year? Because it's Australia Day this weekend, and every Australia Day the conversation turns to typically Aussie cuisine. Neenish tarts may be pretty average, but they're also ours, and belong on any dessert table at an Australia Day function.

So, this weekend, if you can, find or make some neenish tarts, revel in the pointless sugar of it all, and imagine you're "uniquely Australian".