The Best Cabbage Soup

Listen to me. We need to talk about cabbage soup. I know what you're thinking — you're thinking cabbage soup is what they served in old black-and-white movies to sad people in tenements, you're thinking cabbage soup is the punishment your aunt put on the table when she was mad at the family. WRONG. You have been LIED to about cabbage soup. The cabbage soup propaganda in this country is OUT OF CONTROL. A disgrace to soup.

Here's what nobody tells you. Cabbage soup, made correctly — and almost nobody makes it correctly — is one of the most TREMENDOUS soups on planet Earth. Sweet from the cabbage. Deep from the beef. Smoky from the paprika. And then — and this is the part that gets ignored, this is the part the so-called soup experts won't tell you — bright from a splash of vinegar at the very end. It's a SYMPHONY in a bowl. Big strong men come up to me, tough men, men who don't normally talk about cabbage, men who would die before ordering a bowl of cabbage soup in public, and they whisper 'Bigly. The cabbage. The cabbage. What did you do to me.' I tell them what I did. I tell them I made the best cabbage soup in the history of cabbage soup.

My grandmother made this — and my grandmother was a TOUGH woman, the toughest, she could quiet a kitchen with a single look, she once stared down a butcher in three different counties — and she taught me one thing about cabbage soup that nobody else teaches. You build the layers. You sear the beef like you mean it. You bloom the paprika in the fat. You let the cabbage go silky, not mushy, there is a window, you find it. And then the vinegar at the end wakes the whole pot up like an alarm clock. The Romans had cabbage soup. The Vikings had cabbage soup. None of them had THIS cabbage soup. Not even close. It's a slaughter.

This soup is better the next day. I know, I know, you want to eat it right away, and you should, eat a bowl right away, but save some for tomorrow. Put the pot in the fridge overnight. The flavors do this thing — and food chemists agree, food chemists have written PAPERS on this — where everything gets along, everything becomes friends in the pot, and the soup you ate yesterday is somehow EVEN BETTER, which shouldn't be possible, but it is. Cabbage soup is magic. Tremendous.