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Wellspent Market founder Jim Dixon has been writing about food and restaurants for Willamette Week for a long time. He wants our readers to eat well, and he shows them how with the recipes he creates just for us by using simple cooking techniques and easy-to-find ingredients.
Since I don’t speak the language, I try to avoid French culinary terms. But ever since Georges Auguste Escoffier published Le Guide Culinaire (1903), the cookbook that codified how food was prepared, we’ve used his native language to describe a lot what happens in the kitchen. “Gratin” actually refers to a technique: the creation of a nicely browned crust using breadcrumbs, cheese, butter, cream or some combination of two or more. While visually pleasing, the true magic of the gratin is the crunch—that textural resistance that gives way to what lies beneath, which is almost always soft and yielding.
This version combines my favorite vegetable, cabbage, with a couple of others that land high on my list. They get cooked together in good olive oil until wilted and soft. A generous splash of cream makes them even more tasty. As does a final gilding of Parmigiano. The oven’s heat slowly turns the top a burnished mahogany color, with a gentle crunch that whispers “gratin.”
Recipe
- 1 leek, split and sliced about ½ inch thick
- 1 small celery root, about 1½ pounds, peeled and grated*
- ¼ head green cabbage, about 2 cups chopped
- 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
- 1 teaspoon kosher-style sea salt
- 1 cup water or stock (Better Than Bouillon is fine, too)
- 2 tablespoons butter
- ½ cup heavy cream
- 1-2 ounces Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, grated
In a heavy skillet that can go in the oven, cook the leek, celery root and cabbage in the olive oil and salt over medium heat for about 5 minutes.
Add water or stock and continue to cook until soft and wilted, another 10–15 minutes. Add the butter and cream and cook for another few minutes, then remove from the heat.
Use enough Parmigiano to cover the top in a thin layer. Put the skillet, uncovered, into a 350°F oven and cook until the top is nicely browned, about 45 minutes. Serve hot directly from the skillet.
