My grandmother was, unequivocally, the best cook I have ever known. Unfortunately, I knew her when I was still a picky kid with underdeveloped taste buds who avoided anything that even looked like a vegetable, so I didn’t take full advantage of all the dishes she made. Even at that stage, though, I knew that her food was something special. As I’ve gotten older and more knowledgeable about the culinary world, I’m that much more impressed at how she made things so delicious with such basic ingredients and techniques.
This practice, of course, is the heart of most Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. My German ancestors were queens of kitchen thrift, especially after the Great Depression. The dishes I most vividly remember my grandmother making were one or two ingredients at best: skillet-fried potatoes and roast beef she’d somehow get to fork-tender using only water. When my Nanny did venture into longer ingredient lists, they usually included shortcuts like canned soup and jarred seasonings, which was the case for her halupki, a stuffed cabbage roll filled with ground meat.
At first, I didn’t know halupki by its name—instead my mom and aunt confusingly referred to it as “pigs in a blanket” despite the absence of cocktail wieners or puff pastry. I later found out the proper name of the dish, but also discovered it could be referred to as golumpki depending on where in Europe the chef had emigrated from. The various monikers for the dish reflect its many interpretations across cultures. I grew up a stone’s throw away from Amish country, in a region of eastern Pennsylvania where most of the early settlers were German or Dutch, though there are also plenty of Polish and Ukrainian families nearby. And each culture has its own form of the dish where cabbage leaves are stuffed with meat and served with a broth or sauce.
My grandmother’s version of the dish was to use a meat mixture—in this recipe a mix of ground beef and ground pork—seasoned and tucked into boiled cabbage leaves and slowly braised in a pan of liquid. She would use canned tomato soup mixed with beef stock to create a deeply savory sauce. Her own personal flair, which I have yet to hear from anyone else who has ever made or eaten halupki, was to add diced celery to the bottom of the baking dish.
True to my grandmother’s nature, this is an exceedingly simple recipe that yields incredibly delicious results. Picky kid though I was, I’d regularly dig into these meaty rolls on our Sunday visits, likely not realizing that they were wrapped in a vegetable. As an adult, I still love halupki, and appreciate their relatively low-carb status and minimal prep work. In Pennsylvania Dutch culture, they are a holiday staple served at Christmas and Easter. For me and my family, halupki are the epitome of cold-weather comfort food: hearty, saucy and satisfying to both stomach and soul.
