Cabbage
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a plant of the mustard family. This is the plant family to which the turnip, lettuce, radish, shepherd's purse , sweet alyssum, and cress all belong. The cabbage still grows wild on the sea cliffs of the English Channel and of the Mediterranean Sea . The leaves are thick and eatable, but do not form a rosette or head. This wild cabbage, transferred to gardens and improved by cultivation, is the parent of our cabbages, cauliflowers, Brussels sprouts, and kales. Georgia collards, cultivated for greens, are the wild cabbages little changed. The Scotch kale also forms no head, and is much like the original cabbage. Cauliflower is the most changed of all, but we owe it to pretty ancient gardeners. It was well known to the Greeks and Romans. The cauliflower head is partly leaf, but is really composed in large part of enormous flower buds. The cabbage proper has a dense head of leaves. Under ordinary circumstances a cabbage forms a head one year and, if put into a cellar and reset the next spring, or if protected from freezing where it stands, produces seed the second year. The plant then dies. Cabbages produce an enormous number of seeds. A single plant will not infrequently have seed enough to furnish plants for twenty-five acres. Cabbages will not head during hot weather, and for that reason judgment is needed in planting varieties that are well headed before midsummer, or varieties that head late in the season. Cabbage seed is usually sown in window boxes or hotbeds, and the young plants are transplanted when about three inches high. They require from 90 to 200 days, according to variety, to mature. Immense quantities of this vegetable are raised for table use. It is an excellent preventive against some kinds of sickness, particularly scurvy. If cabbage be cut up and packed in a barrel with a liberal sprinkling of salt throughout, a weak brine is formed of the juice of the plant, and slight fermentation takes place. The product is sauerkraut. Cabbages are shipped in crates and barrels to great distances. During the winter of 1903-4 a temporary shortage and high prices brought shipments of crated cabbage from Holland as far west as Minnesota and the Dakotas. A cabbage palm is a palm whose large terminal bud is used as a substitute for cabbage. The word cabbage is related to the Latin word, caput, meaning head. When we say cabbage head we are really doubling our words. For yield, see VEGETABLES.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 account of cabbage as a cultivated form of the wild sea-cliff Brassica oleracea, parent of cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and kale, is exactly what botanists still teach; the species' relationships were formalised in 1935 in the "triangle of U" and its genome was sequenced in 2014. Two details have shifted. Lettuce is not in the mustard family at all but in the daisy family, Asteraceae, though the turnip, radish, cress and shepherd's purse listed alongside it do belong there; and the claim that cauliflower "was well known to the Greeks and Romans" is no longer accepted, since the heading cauliflower appears to be a later eastern Mediterranean development that reached western Europe around the sixteenth century. The entry's note that cabbage "is an excellent preventive against some kinds of sickness, particularly scurvy" was empirical guesswork until vitamin C was isolated and identified as ascorbic acid in 1932.
Written for this edition, 2026.