Brussels sprouts are played out. Kale was a mistake. This winter, embrace cabbage. Affordable, delicious, and astoundingly versatile, it has much more to offer than its reputation suggests.

It is a cliché of food writing to refer to a vegetable as “humble”—the humble carrot, the humble potato—but in the case of cabbage, the cliché is apt. Mark Twain wrote that “cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” Lewis Carroll’s walrus and carpenter discuss topics so unalike from one another that they talk of “cabbages—and kings.” Cabbage, a staple of peasant cuisine across Eurasia, is not merely humble, but the very symbol of humility.

Two thousand years before Twain considered the subject, however, Cato the Elder offered a different view. “Brassica est quae omnibus holeribus a

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