It’s almost encoded in your Jewish DNA: How you make your
stuffed cabbage all depends on where your grandmother came from.
For many, the delicacy is served on the holiday of Simchat Torah
much the same way that latkes are associated with Chanukah,
hamentaschen tag along with Purim and Shavuot comes with a
plethora of dairy dishes. So how did the overcooked, gelatinous,
rolled-up dish become associated with the last festival of the
High Holidays season? “Most of the traditional foods we eat on
Jewish holidays start out with a seasonal reason as to why we
eat them, and later a religious significance is tacked on,” says
Gil Marks, a Jewish food historian and author of the
“Encyclopedia of Jewish Food.” “Vegetables like cabbage were in
season during the fall and very cheap, so stuffed cabbage became
one of the most popular traditional foods eaten. Cabbage was the
odor of the shtetl.” Travel back some 500 years to the 16th
century, when Jews first started living in shtetls. The Jews
mostly kept to themselves, but