Beef Cabbage Curry Recipe

Beef cabbage curry is less a beef curry and more a vegetable curry. The dish is cabbage with a strong taste of beef along with other aromatic spices.

Cabbage (Badhakopi) is one of the star vegetables of winter. And a special shoutout to Badhaopir Kofta, one of my favorites. Though cabbage is now farmed all throughout the year, it’s not available enough to be a all year round vegetable. So cabbage still, at least to me, feels like a winter vegetable. And what a wonderful vegetable it is! Every vegetable is unique in its own way but nothing is quite like cabbage. Crunchy and crispy are not two words you would expect to describe a vegetable. But these two are qualities of cabbage when raw. And when cooked it has a kind of sweet and peppery flavor.

Cabbage is a versatile dish as well. The most popular dish bring Badhakopi torkari (Cabbage curry). Cabbage curry, and most other cabbage dishes can be for breakfast or lunch, meaning you can eat them with rice and porota/ruti.

Cabbage is a homely ingredient for most Bangladeshis. What I mean is dishes made from cabbage are usually associated with just the closest family members. You won’t eat any cabbage dishes in restaurants or hotels. No host will serve you cabbage curry in a dawat or invitation. So dishes related to cabbage are generally just prepared in family settings, by the mothers or grandmothers.

One particularly interesting use of cabbage in Bangladesh, particularly in the streets of Dhaka is as salad. Normally salads are expected to be made from cucumber, tomato, and onion. At minimum there should be cucumbers for food that goes well with refreshing sides or onions in other cases. But both of these vegetables are pricier than cabbage, onion in particular. Onion in Bangladesh is an economic and political pawn, thus the price fluctuates severely at times. The price of onion sometimes reaches such heights that alternatives become a need, not just a way to save some quick bucks. And cabbage slides in this role perfectly. Raw cabbage is crunchy so just biting into it while eating any street food offers that satisfying chew. Then there’s the mildly sweet taste of cabbage that compliments the rich taste of the food.

Just yesterday I had Beef Boti Kabab (Boti processed beef stomach) and they gave some chopped cabbage on the side. There is nothing else, just cabbage and Bot. And honestly you don’t need anything else because the crunchy, sweet cabbage goes so well with the rich, savory, chewy Bot.

Gorur bot with cabbage is technically beef with cabbage but it isn’t a curry. And beef cabbage curry has cooked cabbage so the crunchiness is lost in the curry. Moreover it has actual beef meat, not just processed stomach and fat. So the prior discussion has nothing on beef cabbage curry.

That being said, beef cabbage curry completely embraces the spirit of cabbage. It is absolutely a homely dish, so much so that I have never seen it before. Growing up in a Hindu household, I’ve never had beef in a family setting. Whenever I had beef, it was over at friends’ houses or restaurants. And they won’t serve me something absolutely ordinary like beef cabbage curry.

Another thing about beef cabbage curry is that it’s less a beef curry and more a vegetable curry. The core of the dish is cabbage with a strong taste of beef along with other aromatic spices. You get the flavor of beef and the spices with every bite of cabbage. And then there’s also pieces of meat hiding under the heaps of cabbage. All the veggies and meat create the tender, sweet taste of a home cooked meal.