Cabbage: History and Origins

Table of Contents

1. One Species, Seven Vegetables
2. The Wild Ancestor
3. Where It Was Actually Domesticated
4. Greeks, Romans and Cato's Obsession
5. What the Ancients Actually Grew
6. The Headed Cabbage Appears
7. A Northern European Winter Staple
8. Sauerkraut: What Is Documented and What Is Legend
9. Sauerkraut, Scurvy and Captain Cook
10. Central and Eastern Europe
11. Cabbage in Korea — and a Botanical Correction
12. Cabbage Reaches the Americas
13. What Genetics Added to the Story
14. The Modern Crop
15. Research Papers and References
16. Connections
17. Featured Videos

One Species, Seven Vegetables

Start with the fact that surprises almost everyone who hears it. These are all Brassica oleracea, distinguished only as cultivar groups — the botanical equivalent of dog breeds:

• Cabbage (var. capitata) — the terminal bud, selected to stop growing upward and instead wrap leaf over leaf into a dense head.
• Savoy cabbage (var. sabauda) — the same, with crinkled leaves.
• Kale and collard greens (var. acephala, "without a head") — the leaves, left to grow along an upright stem. This is the form closest to the wild plant.
• Brussels sprouts (var. gemmifera) — the lateral buds in the leaf axils, each one enlarged into a miniature cabbage, dozens per stalk.
• Cauliflower (var. botrytis) — the flower head, arrested before the flowers can form, so the shoot tissue proliferates into a dense white curd.
• Broccoli (var. italica) — the same trick, stopped later, so you eat flower buds still recognisable as buds.
• Kohlrabi (var. gongylodes) — the stem just above the ground, swollen into a pale globe.
• Chinese kale or kai-lan (var. alboglabra) — flowering shoots and leaves together.

They interbreed freely. A cabbage and a kale planted next to each other and allowed to flower will produce viable, and thoroughly confused, offspring. Seed growers keep them well apart for exactly this reason. If you have ever let a cabbage bolt, you have seen the plant revert towards its ancestral shape: it shoots upward, opens into loose leaves, and throws up a spike of small yellow four-petalled flowers that look nothing like a vegetable and everything like the wild plant it came from.

The reason one species could be pushed into so many shapes is discussed in the genetics section below, and it turns out to have a real answer.

The Wild Ancestor

Wild Brassica oleracea is an unimpressive plant to look at. It is a short-lived perennial with a thick woody stem, fleshy waxy blue-green leaves, and a yellow flower spike, and it grows on chalk and limestone sea cliffs — on the coasts of southern and western England, Wales, northern France, and around the Mediterranean.

Every feature of it is an adaptation to a hard place, and every one of those adaptations is what made it worth domesticating:

• Thick, waxy leaves that resist salt spray and hold water — the raw material for a leaf crop.
• A stout stem storing reserves through winter, because a cliff face offers no shelter — the raw material for kohlrabi, and for the biennial habit that lets cabbage survive to be harvested in cold months.
• Tolerance of poor, alkaline, shallow soil, which meant it would grow on land not worth planting with grain.
• Sulfur-based chemical defences — the glucosinolates covered on the chemistry page — evolved against insects, and now the compounds that make brassicas interesting to nutrition researchers.

A vegetable that grows through a northern winter on land nobody wants, keeps for months after harvest, and produces an enormous weight of edible matter per square metre is not a minor crop. It is the reason large populations got through the winter in a world without refrigeration or long-distance food transport.

Where It Was Actually Domesticated

The traditional story is that cabbage was domesticated from the wild plant on the Atlantic coasts of western Europe. Recent genomic work complicates that comfortable picture, and the honest position is that the question is not settled.

Mabry and colleagues' 2021 phylogenomic study examined wild, domesticated and feral B. oleracea along with the group of closely related wild brassicas found around the Mediterranean — species such as B. cretica, B. incana, B. montana and B. rupestris. Their analysis found that the domesticated crops' closest wild relatives lie within that eastern Mediterranean group rather than among the Atlantic cliff populations. It also raised a genuinely awkward possibility: some populations of "wild" B. oleracea on the Atlantic coast may be feral escapes from cultivation rather than pristine ancestors — garden cabbages that went back to the cliffs.

Maggioni and colleagues approached the same question from an entirely different direction, reading the linguistic and literary record: the words used for these plants in Greek, Latin and later European languages, and what classical authors said they looked like. Their reconstruction points to the eastern Mediterranean and Greece as the region where leafy kale-type brassicas were first brought into cultivation, with the distinctly headed forms developing much later and further north.

Two independent methods — genomes and texts — converging on the eastern Mediterranean is a stronger result than either alone. It is not proof, and archaeological evidence for early brassica cultivation is thin because leaves do not preserve the way seeds and grains do.

Greeks, Romans and Cato's Obsession

Brassicas appear in Greek and Roman writing constantly, and not only as food. They were considered medicine.

The single best primary source is Cato the Elder (234–149 BC), whose farming manual De Agri Cultura is the oldest surviving work of Latin prose. In its chapters on cabbage he writes, flatly, that brassica est quae omnibus holeribus antistat — "it is the cabbage which surpasses all other vegetables." He then spends a remarkable amount of space justifying the claim. His prescriptions include:

• Eating raw cabbage dressed with vinegar before a banquet so that you may drink as much as you wish, and again afterwards to recover — the ancient hangover cure, which Greek writers also recommended.
• Cabbage as a treatment for digestive complaints, taken raw and chopped.
• Crushed cabbage leaves applied as a poultice to wounds, ulcers, swellings and tumours — a practice that survives, remarkably, into the modern trial literature on cabbage leaves for breast engorgement.
• The bathing of infants and invalids in the urine of a person who has eaten cabbage, which is where a modern reader is entitled to stop following his advice.

Cato was a fierce Roman traditionalist with a running dislike of Greek physicians, and his cabbage chapters read partly as an argument that a Roman farmer needs no doctor but his own garden. That is worth knowing, because it means his enthusiasm is a rhetorical position as much as a medical observation. It is a genuine primary source about what Romans believed, not evidence that cabbage cures anything. The text is readable in full at LacusCurtius.

Pliny the Elder, writing over two centuries later in his Natural History, devotes an extensive passage to cabbage, catalogues the varieties known in his day, and reports that the Greek physician Chrysippus of Cnidos had written an entire volume on the vegetable. Pliny's list of cabbage cures is even longer than Cato's. Both authors are describing a food that occupied a place in the Roman mind closer to a pharmacy than a side dish. Pliny's text is at Perseus.

What the Ancients Actually Grew

Here is where careful reading matters, and where a lot of popular writing goes wrong.

When Cato and Pliny say brassica, and when Greek writers say krambe or raphanos, they are almost certainly not describing the tight round head you buy today. Maggioni and colleagues' close reading of the Greek and Latin sources finds descriptions of loose-leaved, kale-like plants, of sprouting forms harvested for their shoots, and of stem-thickened types — but no unambiguous description of a firm, dense head.

Pliny does distinguish several kinds by leaf shape, stem and season, which tells us selection was already well under way. What he does not describe is a cabbage as we would recognise it. The ancient brassica was, in modern terms, closer to kale or collards than to a supermarket cabbage.

This is not a quibble. It reframes the whole timeline: cabbage-the-leafy-vegetable is at least two and a half thousand years old, while cabbage-the-head is a medieval northern European achievement.

The Headed Cabbage Appears

The firm-headed cabbage emerges in the European record during the Middle Ages. References to headed forms accumulate in northern European sources from around the twelfth century onwards, and by the time the great printed herbals appear in the sixteenth century — Fuchs, Bock, Matthioli — they carry woodcuts of unmistakably headed cabbages alongside kales and kohlrabi, drawn from life and labelled as distinct kinds.

Why the head? Consider what heading actually is: the growing tip stops elongating and produces leaf after leaf tightly wrapped around itself. From a plant's perspective this is close to useless. From a northern farmer's perspective it is transformative:

• The head is a dense package of edible matter — far more food per plant and per square metre than loose leaves.
• The tightly wrapped outer leaves protect the interior, so the head stores for months in a cold cellar or a clamp instead of wilting in days.
• It harvests in one cut rather than leaf by leaf.
• The inner leaves, grown in darkness, are paler, sweeter and more tender than sun-exposed outer leaves.

Storage is the decisive advantage, and it explains why the head was developed in the north rather than around the Mediterranean. In a climate with a hard winter and no other fresh vegetable between November and March, a crop that keeps in a cellar until spring is not a convenience — it is the difference between eating vegetables in winter and not.

A Northern European Winter Staple

From the late medieval period onwards, cabbage became one of the defining foods of northern and central Europe, for reasons that are entirely practical. It tolerates cold, poor soil and short seasons. It yields heavily. It stores raw for months and, fermented, for a year. And it was cheap enough that it fed people who could afford almost nothing else — which is exactly why it acquired a lingering association with poverty and with the smell of institutional kitchens.

That reputation is unearned and worth setting aside. The sulfurous smell of overcooked cabbage is a preparation failure, not a property of the vegetable: it is the sound of glucosinolates breaking down under prolonged heat, discussed on the chemistry page. Raw, fermented or briefly cooked, cabbage does not smell like that at all.

Sauerkraut: What Is Documented and What Is Legend

Shredded cabbage packed with salt makes its own brine, and lactic acid bacteria already present on the leaves ferment its sugars into lactic acid. The acid preserves it. Plengvidhya and colleagues' DNA fingerprinting work traced which bacteria actually dominate at each stage of a sauerkraut fermentation, and Peñas and colleagues' review covers production and composition; the process needs no starter culture, no equipment and no heat — only cabbage, salt and time.

The legend. A widely repeated story holds that fermented cabbage was invented in China, fed to the labourers building the Great Wall, and carried westward into Europe by the armies of Genghis Khan. It appears in a great many food books. The evidence for it is weak. It is not supported by primary sources on either end of the supposed route, and it has the shape of an origin myth rather than a documented transmission. Fermenting vegetables in brine is a technique that has been independently discovered many times, in many places, because it is what happens naturally when you salt vegetables and leave them alone. Treat the Great Wall story as folklore.

What is documented is a continuous European record of salted and fermented cabbage from the medieval period onward, particularly in German-speaking and Slavic Europe, where it became a fixture of the winter larder. The German word Sauerkraut — "sour cabbage" — is the name that travelled into other languages, but the practice is at least as strongly Slavic, and Polish, Czech, Russian and Ukrainian cuisines all treat fermented cabbage as fundamental rather than incidental. See Sauerkraut.

Sauerkraut, Scurvy and Captain Cook

This is the best-documented episode in cabbage's history, and it is a good story that is usually told slightly wrong.

Scurvy is vitamin C deficiency. Without it the body cannot properly build collagen, and after roughly two to three months without fresh food a sailor's gums bleed, wounds reopen, teeth loosen, old injuries return, and the disease eventually kills. On long voyages it killed more sailors than storms and combat combined. James Lind's famous 1747 shipboard comparison — among the earliest controlled clinical trials — showed citrus worked, though it took the Royal Navy decades to act on it.

Sauerkraut mattered because it kept. Fresh vegetables rotted within weeks in a ship's hold. Fermented cabbage, sealed in a barrel and preserved by its own acid, lasted for months and retained a meaningful part of its vitamin C, because fermentation involves no heat and the acidity protects the vitamin.

James Cook carried large quantities of sauerkraut on his voyages of exploration and, on his return from the second voyage, published an account of his health regimen in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1776; he was awarded the Royal Society's Copley Medal for it. In that account he describes the practical problem of getting sailors to eat an unfamiliar sour German food, and his solution: he had it served daily at the officers' table and made no attempt to compel the crew — whereupon, in his telling, the men decided it must be worth having and began asking for it. Whether or not the psychology was quite so tidy, the anecdote is Cook's own.

Now the correction that usually gets left out. Cook's regimen was not a controlled experiment, and sauerkraut was one item among many. He also carried "portable soup" and malt wort, insisted on cleanliness and ventilation, and — most importantly — reprovisioned with fresh greens, scurvy grass and local produce at every possible landfall. Baron's reassessment of the scurvy story argues that the fresh provisions and frequent reprovisioning did most of the work, and notes that Cook himself put considerable faith in malt wort, which contains essentially no vitamin C and cannot have helped at all. Cook's ships were also not free of disease; men died of dysentery and malaria even when scurvy was held off.

So the accurate version is this: sauerkraut was a genuinely effective antiscorbutic and a real advance in provisioning, Cook deserves credit for a systematic approach to crew health that was unusual for his time, and he was wrong about which parts of it were working. That is a more interesting story than the tidy one.

Central and Eastern Europe

Nowhere did cabbage matter more than in the belt running from Germany through Poland, the Czech lands, Hungary, the Balkans, Ukraine and Russia, where it is not a vegetable among others but a foundation.

• Shchi, the Russian cabbage soup, is one of the oldest continuously eaten dishes in the region, documented for many centuries and traditionally made with fermented cabbage in winter and fresh in summer. Russian proverbs treat it as the definition of a meal.
• Bigos, the Polish hunter's stew of sauerkraut, fresh cabbage and meats, cooked and recooked over days.
• Sarma — cabbage leaves rolled around a filling of meat and grain — runs from the Balkans through Turkey and the Caucasus, in fermented-whole-head versions and fresh-leaf versions, with a parallel tradition of töltött káposzta in Hungary and golubtsy in Russia and Ukraine.
• Whole-head fermentation for sarma is its own craft: entire cabbages are brined so the leaves stay intact and pliable, rather than shredded as for sauerkraut.

The common thread is that these are all winter dishes built around a vegetable that could be relied on when nothing else was available — and that fermentation, which turns a two-month store into a year-long one, was the technology that made a northern winter diet possible at all.

Cabbage in Korea — and a Botanical Correction

Kimchi is the most celebrated cabbage food in the world, and it involves a botanical detail worth getting right: napa cabbage is not the same species as European cabbage. Napa or Chinese cabbage is Brassica rapa subspecies pekinensis — the same species as the turnip and bok choy — not Brassica oleracea. It is a close cousin, domesticated in East Asia along a completely separate line. Everything in this page's opening about one species and seven vegetables applies to European cabbage and its relatives; napa cabbage joined the family later and from elsewhere.

The history of kimchi reflects that. Korean fermented vegetable preparations are very old, but the version most people picture — napa cabbage, red pepper, garlic, ginger, fermented seafood — is comparatively recent, and it assembled in stages:

• Early fermented vegetables in Korea used radish and other vegetables preserved in brine, with no chilli and no napa cabbage.
• Chilli peppers reached Korea from the Americas by way of Portuguese and Japanese trade, arriving no earlier than the end of the sixteenth century. Red-pepper kimchi as a standard preparation belongs to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• Napa cabbage came to dominate kimchi later still, as cultivars suited to the purpose became widely available.

What has not changed is gimjang, the communal late-autumn making of the winter's kimchi — families and neighbours working together to prepare enough to last until spring, traditionally stored in earthenware jars buried in the ground for a steady cool temperature. UNESCO inscribed the practice on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013, recognising it as a social institution rather than merely a recipe. Patra and colleagues' review covers the microbiology and the range of traditional Korean ferments. See Kimchi.

The parallel with sauerkraut is striking and almost certainly independent: two societies at opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass, both facing a winter with no fresh vegetables, both arriving at salted lacto-fermented cabbage, both making it a communal autumn ritual.

Cabbage Reaches the Americas

Cabbage crossed the Atlantic with European colonists. Jacques Cartier is traditionally credited with planting it in what is now Canada during his voyages of the early 1540s — a claim repeated in most accounts, and one that should be labelled as traditional attribution rather than firmly documented. English and Dutch colonists certainly brought it in the seventeenth century, and it established quickly for the same reasons it had in northern Europe: it grew in poor soil and short seasons, yielded heavily, and stored through winter.

Two American foods carry the etymology of that arrival plainly. Coleslaw is the Dutch koolsla, "cabbage salad," which entered English through New York. And sauerkraut arrived with German-speaking immigrants, most visibly the Pennsylvania Germans, whose pork-and-sauerkraut New Year tradition is still kept. Cabbage also became central to Irish cooking — colcannon, and bacon and cabbage — and travelled with Irish emigration, where in American Irish-American cooking the bacon was substituted with corned beef.

What Genetics Added to the Story

Why could one species be pushed into so many shapes when most crops resist that kind of remodelling? Modern genomics has supplied a real answer, and it is not merely "selective breeding worked hard."

The Brassica lineage underwent a whole-genome triplication in its evolutionary past: the entire gene set was multiplied threefold. That left these plants carrying multiple copies of most genes, including the regulatory genes that control how and when different organs grow. Redundant copies are free to be modified without breaking anything essential — if one copy of a gene controlling shoot growth is altered, the others can still do the basic job.

Cheng and colleagues examined this directly in Brassica rapa and Brassica oleracea and found that morphological diversification in both species is associated with selection acting on different subgenome copies of the same genes. The triplication supplied the spare parts; farmers, selecting for whichever organ they wanted bigger, did the rest. That is why one species produced a leaf crop, a bud crop, a lateral-bud crop, two flower crops and a stem crop — and why it happened repeatedly and in parallel in related species.

There is a further piece of context worth knowing. In 1935 the botanist Nagaharu U set out the relationships among the cultivated brassicas in a scheme still called the Triangle of U: three ancestral species — B. rapa (turnip, napa cabbage, bok choy), B. nigra (black mustard) and B. oleracea (cabbage and its kin) — whose pairwise hybridisation gave rise to three further crop species, including B. napus (rapeseed and swede) and B. juncea (brown mustard). Nearly every brassica in a supermarket sits somewhere on that triangle.

The Modern Crop

Cabbage today is grown on every inhabited continent, with world production measured in the tens of millions of tonnes a year and China alone accounting for roughly half of it — current figures are published by FAOSTAT. India, Russia, South Korea and the countries of Eastern Europe are also major producers, and per-person consumption remains highest in exactly the regions this history would predict.

Modern breeding has specialised the crop into distinct types for distinct jobs: dense storage cabbages bred to hold for months; kraut cabbages selected for uniform size and low fibre; early fresh-market types; savoys for tenderness; red varieties for colour stability. Most commercial cabbage is now grown from F1 hybrid seed, which gives the uniform maturity a mechanical harvest requires and also means growers buy seed each season rather than saving it.

The variety maintained in seed banks and by home gardeners matters here. Heirloom and landrace cabbages carry traits — disease resistance, flavour, adaptation to particular climates — that uniform commercial hybrids do not, and they are the raw material for future breeding. Mabry and colleagues' work on wild and feral populations is directly relevant: the cliff-growing wild relatives are a genetic reservoir for a crop that feeds a very large number of people.

What has not changed in two and a half thousand years is the thing that made the plant worth domesticating in the first place. Cabbage still grows where other vegetables will not, still yields more food per square metre than almost anything else green, still keeps for months without a refrigerator, and is still among the cheapest sources of vitamin C a person can buy. Cato was wrong about most of what he claimed for it. He was not wrong that it was worth writing about.

Research Papers and References

1. Mabry ME, Turner-Hissong SD, Gallagher EY, et al. The evolutionary history of wild, domesticated, and feral Brassica oleracea (Brassicaceae). Molecular Biology and Evolution. 2021;38(10):4419–4434. — doi:10.1093/molbev/msab183
2. Maggioni L, von Bothmer R, Poulsen G, Branca F. Origin and domestication of cole crops (Brassica oleracea L.): linguistic and literary considerations. Economic Botany. 2010;64(2):109–123. — doi:10.1007/s12231-010-9115-2
3. Maggioni L, von Bothmer R, Poulsen G, Lipman E. Domestication, diversity and use of Brassica oleracea L., based on ancient Greek and Latin texts. Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution. 2018;65(1):137–159. — doi:10.1007/s10722-017-0516-2
4. Cheng F, Sun R, Hou X, et al. Subgenome parallel selection is associated with morphotype diversification and convergent crop domestication in Brassica rapa and Brassica oleracea. Nature Genetics. 2016;48(10):1218–1224. — doi:10.1038/ng.3634
5. Cook J. The method taken for preserving the health of the crew of His Majesty's ship the Resolution during her late voyage round the world. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. 1776;66:402–406. — doi:10.1098/rstl.1776.0023 — Cook's own account, the primary source for the sauerkraut episode.
6. Baron JH. Sailors' scurvy before and after James Lind — a reassessment. Nutrition Reviews. 2009;67(6):315–332. — doi:10.1111/j.1753-4887.2009.00205.x — the corrective to the tidy version of the Cook story.
7. Peñas E, Martinez-Villaluenga C, Frias J. Sauerkraut: production, composition, and health benefits. In: Fermented Foods in Health and Disease Prevention. 2017:557–576. — doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-802309-9.00024-8
8. Plengvidhya V, Breidt F, Lu Z, Fleming HP. DNA fingerprinting of lactic acid bacteria in sauerkraut fermentations. Applied and Environmental Microbiology. 2007;73(23):7697–7702. — doi:10.1128/AEM.01342-07
9. Patra JK, Das G, Paramithiotis S, Shin HS. Kimchi and other widely consumed traditional fermented foods of Korea: a review. Frontiers in Microbiology. 2016;7:1493. — doi:10.3389/fmicb.2016.01493
10. Fahey JW, Zalcmann AT, Talalay P. The chemical diversity and distribution of glucosinolates and isothiocyanates among plants. Phytochemistry. 2001;56(1):5–51. — doi:10.1016/S0031-9422(00)00316-2 — the chemical defences the wild plant brought with it.
11. Cato the Elder. De Agri Cultura, chapters on brassica. — Full text at LacusCurtius — the primary source for Roman cabbage medicine.
12. Pliny the Elder. Natural History, Book 20. — Full text at Perseus — the fullest classical catalogue of cabbage varieties and uses.
13. UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. Kimjang, making and sharing kimchi in the Republic of Korea, inscribed 2013. — UNESCO listing
14. FAO. FAOSTAT crops and livestock products — current world cabbage production figures
15. Further reading: PubMed: Brassica oleracea domestication history

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Connections

• All Food
• Cabbage
• Cabbage Benefits
• Broccoli — the same species, bred for arrested flower buds.
• Broccoli History
• Kale — the form closest to the wild ancestor.
• Kale History
• Cauliflower
• Brussels Sprouts — the lateral buds, enlarged.
• Kohlrabi — the swollen stem.
• Collard Greens
• Bok Choy — Brassica rapa, the other line of the family.
• Sauerkraut
• Kimchi
• Fermented Foods
• Fermented Foods History
• Vitamin C — the vitamin whose absence made sauerkraut strategic.
• Spinach History
• Glucosinolates and Sulforaphane

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