When I was an infant, someone gave my parents an odd gift: a food mill, so you could turn whatever you were eating into baby food. They used to feed me this stuffed cabbage—my great grandmother's recipe—as if it were puréed pumpkin. As I aged, it’s no wonder that it became a siren song to me. The sumptuous, rich scent it’d give off as it bubbled away on the stove was enough to pry me from whatever I was doing and lure me into the kitchen, shoeless and ravenous as one of Pavlov’s dogs. “Have you ever had anything so good in your entire life?” my dad would ask, cutting a stuffed cabbage roll in two and handing us each an enormous spoonful, complete with hot tomato sauce and shredded chuck, braised until quite literally falling apart. A drop of sauce would fall onto his shirt. “Never,” I’d say, handing him a towel.

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