The collards mystery

Almost in winter now so one last homesteading post.

I didn’t really expect it last this long but now I know it’s standard: collards survive nice and fresh right into winter. So I collected half the plants I have growing outside and made some collard greens. Also baked the little pile of beans I grew this season. Turned out great.

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Cooking collards I got to thinking about the geopolitics of cabbage.

Cabbage and cauliflower are big in Russian/Soviet cuisine. Massive. Cabbage might as well be the national plant. But primitive cabbage types like collards or kale — which come from the same species but are less “evolved” —  were non-existent as a food source in the Soviet Union as far as I can tell. Kale has been introduced in recent years but it’s still pretty limited. (There isn’t even a Russian wikipedia page for collards, although there is a short one for kale.) I find this a bit strange because both collards and kale are very nutritious, packed with vitamins, and are very tolerant to cold. They’re still nice and fresh in my garden even though we’ve been dipping into freezing temperatures almost every night now. So they’re perfect for Russia’s climate. Most of Russia’s neighbors to the east seem have their own national kale/collard dishes and the plants have been a staple in western Eurasia for a few thousand years — ever since the Greeks and then Romans, who loved their primitive cabbage, spread them around during conquest. So they’ve eaten in a lot of places. But not in Russia. I wonder why…

Now that I think about it, could it be connected to the Roman conquest? Where Romans ruled collards/kale is eaten? Can’t be that simple? Maybe it is.

—Yasha

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