Deborah Madison has been a great inspiration to me for years. I have several of her books, including her latest “Vegetable Literacy”. I just finished reading Vegetable Literacy (I am kind of weird in that I read cookbooks cover to cover) and I think it is one of her best books to date.

One of the first dishes that caught my eye in the book was a cabbage panade. The culinary term ‘panade’ generally means that a vegetable soup type dish is thickened with bread or bread crumbs. I think of a panade as an easy way to clean out the refrigerator, and use up odds and ends of vegetables and such. A panade is very forgiving and very hard to screw up. It’s kind of an old school peasant type dish. This turns out to be sort of like french onion soup/stuffing dish, with cabbage.

Here is the original recipe.

I made the cabbage panade with just a couple changes. I took some pictures and I noted the changes I made.

The original recipe calls for onions. I had some leeks from my garden and since leeks and onions are both from the allium family, I know I can interchange them. I used about twice the amount of alliums called for in the original recipe because I like leeks and onions, a lot!

Cook the alliums and add the cabbage. Ms Madison has you make a garlic stock for this recipe, that seemed really fiddley. I didn’t do that. I had some homemade chicken stock, so I used that and added some garlic. I am sure you can use a good quality store bought stock and add some garlic and be just fine.

Cook all that for about 20 minutes, very ‘done’. These are about 1/2 ‘done’, keep cooking them.

When the cabbage and alliums are done layer 1/2 the vegetable mixture into a casserole dish, then add some stale bread and cheese, then top with the rest of the vegetable mixture.

I used 4 pieces of bread and more cheese. I just wanted to show you how it was layered.

Pour the remaining stock over the whole thing and into the oven it goes for about 45 minutes to an hour.

When it is all brown and gooey it’s done.

Yum. This reheats beautifully and will travel well if you need to take a dish to a potluck, this would be a great choice.

Thanks for reading the blog. Happy winter, I hope to see you in 2015.
Mo