A Taste of Home reader contributed this project to the magazine, and I found that it resonates with me because my ethnic heritage is Polish on my mother’s side. She used to make her childhood recipes at holiday times—never often enough for me, my father and my Pacific-Islander husband—and fortunately I learned them, as well as some of the Pacific Island foods that my first mother-in-law taught me to make.
But if you want a blockbuster dinner for some very special guests, here is an option for those who are willing to take some time and effort. It isn’t very hard to cook chicken and fish, but this combination of Cabbage Rolls and pork ribs has an ambience of Central Europe that will warm anyone’s heart these late-winter evenings.
In Southern Arizona it is already warming up, and the plants have started sprouting. We get cold fronts but basically winter is over down here and the tourist-related businesses like restaurants are picking up. The people who visit Arizona in their later years are very often from an ethnic background and if I were to make this dish for guests I am sure that their hearts would melt. Shucks, my friends at church go bonkers when I make a rhubarb pie.
You will probably have to make a shopping trip for this dish; I buy most of my meat at Sunflower Supermarkets in Tucson because they market clean, natural varieties of beef, pork and lamb. The cabbage head is also something that I wouldn’t have on hand, but making Cabbage Rolls used to be such a common practice in the ethnic ghettoes of Chicago and New York that they could frequently be found in the Irish, Polish, Jewish and Hungarian households.
My mother came from Chicago's Northwest Side, up Milwaukee Avenue on the diagonal through a neighborhood called Six Corners (for those of you who know Chicago). I lived there in another nearby neighborhood called Logan Park for some years, and I once visited the high school she graduated from, Jacob Riis High School.
I wish that I could go to a real Slavic ethnic market, but most of them are gone with the yesterday that summoned them into existence to supply the immigrants who came to this country in another century. The priest of my church tells us that his father opened the first Mexican grocery store in Detroit, Michigan and I wish I could have seen that, too. One place like that in Tucson is the Mabuhay Market on Craycroft and 29th Street, where I get some of the soul food that I grew up with on Guam.
HUNGARIAN RIBS AND STUFFED CABBAGE
Ingredients:
3 pounds pork ribs
1 large head of fresh cabbage (about 3 pounds)
1-1/4 pounds ground beef
1 pound ground pork
2 large onions, finely chopped
1 cup cooked rice
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon pepper
1 large can tomato puree or crushed tomatoes (29 ounces)
1 package sauerkraut, rinsed and drained (32 ounces)
Preheat your oven to 325 degrees. Place the ribs in a 9-x-13-inch baking pan, cover them with aluminum foil and bake them for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, core the cabbage and cook it in a large pot of boiling water for 2-3 minutes, until the leaves become pliable. Remove the cabbage head from the pot and set it in a colander to cool and drain.
When the head of cabbage has cooled enough to handle, cut off the outer leaves whole. Return the head to the hot water, repeating the procedure until you have 12 soft cabbage leaves.
Cut the thick center veins from the cabbage leaves and set them aside. In a mixing bowl, stir together the beef, pork, onions, rice, garlic, salt and pepper.
Place about ½ cup of this filling in the center of each cabbage leaf and roll it up to seal the filling inside.
Remove the baking pan with the ribs from the oven. Drain the ribs.
In a large Dutch oven, layer the tomato puree and 1 cup of sauerkraut in the bottom and place some of the ribs on top of that. Continue layering this way until the ribs, sauerkraut and tomatoes are inside. Place the cabbage rolls on top.
Put the Dutch oven into the stove oven and cook for 45-55 minutes, or until the cabbage rolls are done. When you remove the ribs and cabbage rolls to two separate serving dishes, you can also thicken the pan juices to make a sauce.
This is a Polish thing, but we would have served this dish with mashed potatoes. Perhaps the Hungarian treatment might be with plain boiled potatoes—another Polish custom—but potatoes seem to be indicated as a side dish for this magnificent creation.
I would serve a strong white Zinfandel wine that would stand up to the flavors but not take over like a red wine. Keep your dessert light—perhaps just Oddments and coffee.
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