Red cabbage Twente-style

Rode kool op z'n Twents

1 kilogram red cabbage
100 grams bacon
1 onion
salt and pepper
2 cloves
1 glass red wine
1 tbsp currants
250 grams red currant jam

Dice the bacon and slowly brown. Peel and dice the onion, add it to the bacon and sautee. Grate or chop the cabbage and add it to the pan, mixing well. Add salt and pepper to taste, put in the cloves, currants and jam. Pour in the wine. Turn down the heat and let the cabbage simmer until ‘al dente’. Serve with your choice of meat, mashed potatoes and garnish with fried slices of apple.

Cloves in Dutch are called ‘kruidnagelen’, where ‘kruid’ means ‘herb’ and the word ‘nagelen’ is used because cloves look like nails and ‘nagelen’ is the old Dutch word for nails or ‘spijkers’. Cloves (one of the oldest known spices) are the dried buds of an aromatic tree indigenous to the Moluccan Islands where the Dutch from the 17th century on monopolized the spice trade. Centuries later, French and British traders ‘stole’ seedlings of the trees and planted them in their own tropical colonies. Madagascar and Zanzibar today are the leading growers.