Purple Cabbage

king of the alchemical kitchen

“The full moon shone brightly between the trees, so I was able to see, a few yards in front of me, the origins of a distressing noise. It was two cabbages having a terrible fight. They were tearing each other's leaves off with such ferocity that soon there was nothing but torn leaves everywhere and no cabbages.

"Never mind," I told myself, "It's only a nightmare." But then I remembered suddenly that I'd never gone to bed that night, and so it couldn't possibly be a nightmare. "That's awful.”

―Leonora Carrington,The Oval Lady, Other Stories: Six Surreal Stories

How amazing is a cabbage? So solid and so inexpensive. I hardly need to describe this unbruisable peasant staple made to last all winter in a dark cellar that can be singed or boiled or roasted without losing its texture of shape. But its filigreed layers seem to hide some other story and the closer I look at it the weirder it seems to get. I think of the psychedelic gardens of Findhorn and its later gigantic forms under the midnight sun. I think of my Polish grandmother who escaped the war on Red Cross boat with her sister while the bombs fell and her refusal to cook this vegetable. And I think of the Winter King or Savoy Cabbage with its crinkled emerald green that only brightens by boiling. But most of all I think of Leonora Carrington who saw the cabbage like no one else. The red cabbage was maybe for her the very spirit of the alchemical kitchen where Carrington dissolved the boundaries between plant, animal, mineral in her otherworldly domestic eggy paintings.

Leonora Carrington Cabbage 1987

I spoke with bookbinder, performance artist, black walnut beta-tester and sometimes inky icemelter Alisha Piercy this afternoon about cabbages and their endless parenthetical meanings. She was drawn to the cabbage’s sculptural qualities—its hidden roselike beauty and its sneaky ability to enter the body. Piercy, an early magnet to Leonora Carrington bound one of Carrington’s rarer books in a protective cabbage leaf-imprinted leather. Years later cabbages acted as a kind of ritualist intermediary between artist and acolytes in series called PICNIC that Piercy conjured up with Heidi Sopinka and Natalie Matutschovski a project which ended in meeting this last of the Surrealists a few years before her death. Alisha also noted that in pressing cabbage leaves into leather that they left no only a shape but a stain.

It was with all of this in (the back of my) mind that I started playing with purple cabbage ink. The recipe is simple: cover a good chunk of purple cabbage with a strong white vinegar, add some salt and let it sit for a few day in a glass jar. While you are waiting for the colour intensification to happen track down a copy of The Hearing Trumpet or The Oval Lady and succumb to this vegetable.

I work a lot with purple vegetables. This collaboration with Wendy MacNaughton’s Draw together was one of my proudest moments. Purple cabbage shares with black beans, red onions, beets and blueberry the magical anthocyanin pigments

A selection of inktests on scraps of stonehenge paper and in my sketchbook with red cabbage ink. Red cabbage is particularly susceptible to PH changes baking soda or lemon or using different kinds of paper will have extraordinary colour effects.

Here it is after a few hours going almost bluegreen in my sketchbook. I love stains.

Don’t you sometimes love the internet for images?

Alison Holt Pink Cabbage, 2019 (freehand machine embroidery, silk painting)

awakened vegetables of Findhorn

PICNIC Alisha Piercy, Heidi Sopinka and Natalie Matutschovski More Here

Shi Jinsong 史金淞 A Quick Change ─ Gold Cabbage NO.7 金蝉脱壳·金百财7 号, 2015 Copper plating 24K gold 铜胎镀24K金

Next Week: maybe “Back to School” Colours or else Sulphur or some new random colour. Please spread the word. Please comment on your kitchen alchemy or Borsht recipes or whatever. The Colour is free!