With the holidays of dining, drinking and snacking behind us, let’s bring more vegetables into our diets. Cabbage is a good one to start with. After all, for a couple of months most of us are trying to cut down on the consumption of meats, sweets and treats. 

This green vegetable has been in cultivation for thousands of years. It is not known for certain where cabbage appeared for the first time because many plants belong to the “brassicas” family which grows around the world. Today’s cabbages descend from them. Non-heading cabbage was being cultivated in Europe some 3,000 years ago while in the East, especially China, it was being planted 4,000 years ago. By the time of the early Greek and Roman dynasties, cabbage was widely grown. The Romans considered it a luxury and many regarded it as better than all other vegetables. They also used it for medicinal purposes as relief from gout, headaches and symptoms of poisonous mushroom ingestion.

The first round-...