cabbage

Imagine a crisp bundle of pale-green to deep-purple leaves wrapped into a compact head—that’s this versatile vegetable. It can seem simple at first, but it shows up in surprisingly many dishes: from salads and slaws to stews, stir-fries, and fermented recipes like sauerkraut. Cabbage has been grown for thousands of years and remains a kitchen favorite across many cuisines.

The word likely traces back to Old French caboche (“head”), which is a very fitting image for this plant. You may also hear it in a playful, old-fashioned insult like “cabbage head,” meaning someone who seems slow or dull.

Cabbage is a leafy vegetable usually grown from the species Brassica oleracea. It forms a dense, layered head made of many leaves and is usually treated as a short-season vegetable for harvest. Common varieties include green, red (or purple), and crinkled Savoy cabbages. You’ll also find Napa cabbage in many recipes, especially in Asian cooking, though it belongs to Brassica rapa rather than Brassica oleracea.

Nutritionally, it has been valued for vitamin C and for how well it stores well and ferments, especially into foods like sauerkraut and kimchi—both important in traditional diets. In everyday English, its best-known figurative use is still the mild insult “cabbage head.” In some older American slang, “cabbage” has also been used as a casual term for money, though it is less common today. From humble coleslaw to hearty soups, this word carries both culinary weight and a few colorful figurative meanings.