Cabbage

Cabbage is the winter vegetable that keeps a Greek table going between November and March, and its two main dishes both belong to that season. Lahanodolmades are the cold weather version of dolmades, minced meat and rice rolled in blanched cabbage leaves instead of vine leaves and almost always finished with avgolemono, which suits the sweeter, milder leaf better than a tomato sauce would.

The other is lahanosalata, raw cabbage shredded as finely as the cook can manage, usually with grated carrot, dressed with olive oil and lemon or vinegar. It is the winter salad in the same way horiatiki is the summer one, and it appears on taverna tables precisely when tomatoes are out of season and not worth eating. Shredding it thinly is the entire technique.

For rolling, the leaves need softening first, either by dropping the whole cored head into boiling water and peeling leaves away as they loosen, or by freezing the head overnight and thawing it, which collapses the cell walls and does the same job without a pot of boiling water. The thick central rib of each leaf is pared flat so the roll will sit tight.