Among certain devotees, the advent of icy weather has sharpened the need for warming sarma, the stuffed cabbage dish said to be native to Romania, but subject to wide interpretation.
One of the most coveted renditions locally is served at Balkan Express Restaurant, the homey dining room appended to a hardware store, a block off South Street, near 23rd.
The down-home stuffing is a variant of stuffed cabbage recipes everywhere - tender rice and ground beef, delicately packed, though, and in this case gently seasoned with onion and paprika.
Though its pedigree (if cabbage dishes can be said to have "pedigrees") is Romanian, the restaurant's owner, Radovan Jacovic, says, "We don't cook it as they cook it."
The way he cooks it is the way his mother cooked it for 60 years.
Jacovic is a looming John Wayne of a man, a Serb from near Belgrade, his signature knit cap rolled up at the ears. His wife, Wendy, is Filipino. Why be slavish about some Romanian technique?
One characteristic sets this version apart from most stuffed cabbage: It is the leaves of the "barrel cabbage" that are used to wrap the dove-sized sarma.
This is where the true flavor resides, not in the filling, but in the wrapping - the leaves juicy and bright, salty and mildly soured from natural fermentation; lovely sauerkraut in full.
Philadelphia's disconcertingly un-Balkan, warm winter this season has not been optimal for souring cabbage - or for eating it, frankly. Until, suddenly, now.
So there has been a bit of a conundrum. When Jacovic started pickling his cabbage, the unseasonable warmth got it off to a roaring start; it was pickled before its time. Now that there's fresh demand, he's measuring whether he'll have enough to last: In the past, he could count on his stash lasting until April.
We step into the backyard of the kitchen on a black February night. In the walled enclosure a 40-gallon stockpot broods under a mat, frost thickening over the top, white layer of cabbage.
Weeks before, he and Wendy had begun the brining, cleaning and coring the heads ("Like you do the apple"), pouring salt into the holes, wedging pieces of cabbage in the spaces for a tighter fit, filling with water.
Then he put a circular wooden frame on the top of tall pails in his basement, weighing them down with stones he collected during his days as a contractor.
The broad outer leaves of the cabbage are reserved for the famous sarma. But no part of the cabbage goes to waste: The next layer of leaves is hacked into sweet, meaty hunks and stewed in a luscious saffron-colored broth with tender lamb; and farther down the pecking order there is cold, fermented sauerkraut salad (not to be confused with kupus salata, a fresh, crunchy, shredded cabbage salad tossed with oil and vinegar).
Back in his Balkan homeland, Jacovic reports, "We like to drink the brine." In Hungary, I've read, even the cabbage's hard core is eaten, typically as a relish with roast or fried pork.
Sarma, of course, is hardly the be-all and end-all at Balkan Express. There's a menu of house-smoked cold-cuts (deeply redolent of the smokehouse), and an uptown version of spicy chicken paprikash tucked in a soft crepe purse, and sliced beet salads with horseradish, and chewy, hot-paprika-inflected Hungarian goulash.
But Jacovic knows the craving for sarma, especially now, is unlikely to let up. And he knows that barrel cabbage - in the cold weather - takes its own sweet time.
"Sauerkraut does not grow on trees," he says, with a trace of concern: April is a long ways off.
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