White cabbage is the new rocket

Who invented the Swedish pizza salad?

Who ever it was, their image should be immortalised in a white cabbage sculpture.
Pizza salad is for the visit to a Swedish pizzeria like soy sauce is to a Japanese meal – a must. And on top of it, one could interpret this glorious delicacy as a culinary expression of Swedish socialism because the pizza salad is FREE. Amazing. Or not.
The pizza salad is made by one of the cheapest vegetables there is, white cabbage. It’s a vegetable that in general isn’t going down in history as the most sensual or exotic piece of nature. While asparagus could trigger erotic ideas and the lure of phallic horizons, white cabbage draws a blank. Or, for the breastfeeding masses out there, white cabbage could, at a stretch, trigger ideas about soothing breasts riddled with the agonies of mastitis. Therefore, the likelihood of asparagus and white cabbage ending up on the same plate is not very big.

To create this delicacy, the cabbage is sliced thinly and then doused in oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and if you’re lucky, a spot of pickled capsicum. Does this sound pretty lame? Just hang in there. The salad gets better the older it gets. A bit like a nice wine. It needs time. Just not too much time because then your Grange Hermitage of pizza salads turn into bad cabbage. And you don’t want to eat that, trust me.

In Sweden, it doesn’t matter how fantastic the actual pizza is, and how cheap it is, if you don’t get offered your free pizza salad, the likeliness of a return visit to that particular pizzeria is close to zero. Sounds strange, but then again, we can be kind of strange people. So when my craving for a good ol’ pizza salad to go with my Kebab pizza gets the better of me I head to Sven’s Viking Pizza in Bondi Junction. So good is his salad AND his pizzas that the Italian Association of Pizza Makers in Australia is looking for a way to close him down. Not bad for a guy with a viking helmet. Go Sven!