COMFORT FOOD | RECIPE

Hungarian Winter Cabbage Soup

Smoked slab bacon, pork side ribs, savoy cabbage, smoked ham, a dump of paprika, and a dollop of sour cream make one good soup

Photo and soup by author.

A generation or a little more ago, small-town life offered safety, community and modest homes with big backyards. In my mountaintop hometown, backyard lawns gave way to substantial gardens. Sadly, these days, even small towns have lost such luxurious fertile ground to big-money developers intent on maximizing every inch, building homes where rooftops nearly touch, yet neighbours often remain strangers.

As a child, our family garden loomed large over free time. After carting wheelbarrow loads of manure and compost, we turned the soil shovel by gruelling shovel. Once the greens broke the soil, our parents tasked us with weeding, watering and harvesting, chores that could kill most of a Saturday when we would rather be roaming the woods with friends until suppertime arrived with hunger and parental demand to return.

The garden was a double plot, each side approximately 30x30 feet, split by a cement walkway (placed by our father and his two slave sons) to the garage.

My mother grew practically everything, including root vegetables, squash, and leafy…