Cabbage Head

Juergen Kohl and Paracelsus had three things in common—their Swiss birth, an ego that could be measured on the Richter scale, and a desire to find a place in the intricate kaleidoscope of history.

Physician, alchemist, scientist and astrologer, Paracelsus has sometimes been unjustly vilified as the source of the Faust legend. His given name was Theophrastus Philippus Bombastus Aureolus von Hohenheim, and that third name may have been sufficient to secure his place in posterity had he achieved nothing else—for to be bombastic is to be like Paracelsus. Even the professional name he chose for himself was a boast that he was better than Celsus—the Roman father of medicine.

Putting legends aside, this man successfully treated syphilis four hundred years before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, and postulated the unconscious mind ahead of Jung and Freud. On a more mundane level he gave us the zinc ointment we still use as sun block.

The sheer breadth and volume of his discoveries were bound to establish him as a historical giant, but Kohl was an aspirant of a very different calibre. His education was minimal, his mental acuity average, and his job repetitive. Although he boasted of his prowess, he found his work tedious and longed for fame. Juergen Kohl was a cook.

An enormous man, Kohl stood a full two metres tall and his girth would have been excessive even for a heavyweight sumo wrestler. His pale blue eyes, normal in a lesser person, seemed small and beady in the large, rough-hewn cube that comprised his head. They seemed to be ever-moving, always seeking some advantage in whatever situation he found himself.

When he entered a room its occupants seemed to diminish, for his mass was overpowering and his booming voice dominated all conversation. Had he lacked self-esteem and adopted the Schultz mantra of, I see nothing, I hear nothing! he could have passed as a real-life double for John Banner who played that role in Hogan's Heroes—but lack of confidence had never been his problem.

Of course, he never described himself as a cook. "I am a famous chef," he told anybody who came within earshot. "In Europe I worked in the greatest restaurants, I was chef to royalty and wealth. It is only since I came to this God-forsaken country that I find it necessary to work in such establishments as this."

In fact, Kohl's career was less auspicious than he admitted, even to himself. As a youth he travelled to France where he found work as an apprentice chef in a little-known Marseilles restaurant. He had completed only two years of his training when, caught up in the romance of that ancient port, he signed on as ship's cook to the crew of a container vessel. From that time on his culinary skills declined until he found himself able to find work in only the least discriminating restaurants.

It was his time at sea that ultimately created the mind-set that would secure him his dream of immortality. As big and powerful as he was, he had still been an adolescent. He had all the gullibility that goes with that awkward time of life and, as a result, found himself the butt of many shipboard pranks. His unfortunate coincidence of name and body shape earned him a nickname he hated, but was unable to escape: he was called Kohlkopf—Cabbage Head.

Perhaps it was that name, or perhaps it was a means of payback to the crew who made him feel so impotent, but he began to search for cabbage recipes. He may not have been able to stop the banter: ("Who called the cook a dummkopf? Who called the dummkopf a cook?") but he took his revenge by restricting the menu he served.

And if he was to be Cabbage Head then, von Gott, cabbage is what they would eat.

He searched his cook books for recipes and found ways to serve cabbage as main courses as well as side vegetables. He prepared cabbage soups, cabbage rolls, cabbage cake, cabbage cutlets, chilli cabbage, cabbage pie, cabbage casserole, Hungarian cabbage, and sauerkraut.

Such was the crew's resentment that had Juergen been a smaller man he may well have found himself taking an unexpected midnight swim; but a quarter of a tonne of angry young man is not so easy to throw overboard, and the torture continued.

To make it worse, the methane in the crew's quarters made sleeping unpleasant and, after a couple of weeks' intake of cabbage, the build-up of gas made the men nervous about smoking below decks in case of an explosion.

The situation could not be allowed to continue, of course, and Kohl was paid off when the ship berthed in Sydney. There he found employment in a succession of low-grade restaurants where he boasted of his imaginary culinary background.

As the years passed and recollections of his European childhood blended with the fanciful past he had created for himself, Juergen Kohl never forgot his dream of posterity and, in his later years, published a book of cabbage recipes. It was the first of them that made his name a household word.

Under a heading that brooked no argument he encapsulated in just eleven words the natural law that would give him immortality—a law that was the very basis of his limited culinary skill:

Kohl's Law
Shredded cabbage is best when combined with grated carrots and mayonnaise.