Soothe your mind and body with this quick, comforting cabbage soup

After weeks of buttery sweets, crisp latkes, rich stews and cheese laden casseroles, I m in the mood for meals that are lighter but still warming and...

After weeks of buttery sweets, crisp latkes, rich stews and cheese-laden casseroles, I’m in the mood for meals that are lighter but still warming and cozy. Baechu Doenjang Guk, or Cabbage and Doenjang Soup as it’s called in English, is Joanne Lee Molinaro’s way of soothing her mind and body. Known to online audiences as the Korean Vegan, Molinaro has a new cookbook, "The Korean Vegan: Homemade,” that is full of easy but gratifying recipes. A born storyteller, Molinaro invites readers into her inner world in her latest book, sharing deeply personal remembrances from her childhood and early adulthood. After reading it, like her other fans, I felt a connection.

That connection helped me make the leap from reading her book to cooking from it. As I flipped through the recipes, the one for this soup stood out. "Baechu Doenjang Guk is for when you’re feeling a little blue or a little tired. It will lift your spirits with both its healing properties (the cabbage is so good for the tummy) and its mouthwatering flavor,” she wrote.

I called her to chat about how she created the dish. "Personally, I was having stomach problems at the time, and I had read that something that could help with stomach issues was cabbage, so I started cooking with a lot of cabbage,” she told me. "I remembered this Korean recipe with cabbage and doenjang. I had just been talking to a friend who’s a total foodie about where you draw the line between guk and chigae, soup and stew. I knew I wanted this to be a soup. One distinction is that there’s not too much protein … so it’s meant to be easy on the tummy and curative.”

Molinaro originally used standard green cabbage here, and although that worked well, she decided to try it with the cabbage Koreans have been using for centuries. "I thought it was okay with regular cabbage, but when I used napa cabbage, it felt like it came to life for me,” Molinaro said. "This soup is soothing both physically but also mentally for me. The flavor of doenjang is the most comforting flavor in my culinary vocabulary. It’s the flavor I go back to when something is really tough.”

Doenjang is a fermented soybean paste, similar to Japanese miso but more deeply savory and more pungent. Molinaro included a recipe for spicy doenjang chigae, a traditional Korean stew flavored with doenjang, in her first cookbook. It’s a dish that she ate countless times growing up but that her mother avoided making if a non-Korean was coming to the house, because she worried they’d be put off by the smell. In a surprising twist, that recipe was a hit among Molinaro’s readers. "I’d spent so much of my childhood being embarrassed at the smell and appearance of doenjang, and so the surprising popularity of this humble stew signaled to me what I’d always suspected deep down - despite all the boundaries we’ve erected to divide us, we have far more in common than we realize,” Molinaro wrote. "We all just love delicious food!”