Well... Nothing secret there, although I do them more by intuition than traditional recipes. Or rather using intuition to follow the recipes I've heard or read but never written down.
So:
Take a cabbage, carve some of the stem off and put it into a kettle with some (vegetable, beef or mixed) stock with a lid on, stem down. It's more like steaming than cooking, so a couple of inches is enough. It's to soften the leaves for rolling.
I'm efficient because of being lazy, so I also throw in some barleycorns (dark rice will do, too) into the mix. They'll cook there without any extra effort and get some flavour from the stock and the cabbage.
Make a dough of minced meat, preferably pork and beef mixed so it has a fat content of 16 - 20%. Chopped onions, sauteed if you wish, plus a garlic clove or two, pepper, allspice, some herbs, a little salt (not too much since they'll be cooked in stock). In the meanwhile look how your cabbage is doing. Peel the softened leaves off and thin the stem for easy rolling. Also carve more of the stem out of the cabbage. Mince them into the meat dough. Save the stock!
When you've got all the big enough leaves softened and on a plate, under a towel, cool the barley a little so it doesn't cook the meat and mix it into the dough.
Now take a cabbage leaf, put some dough at the stem end and roll it to a steady package so nothing comes out. If there's holes in the leaves, use the smaller leaves for patching from inside. Put the rolls quite tightly in a high buttered oven form and add stock about a third to halfways to the roll sides. Add some syrup as stripes across the rolls. Bake until ready. When they start to get some colour, turn the rolls so the bottom side gets a little brown and the leaves don't dry. Add a little syrup here, too.
Eat with crushed, lightly sweetened lingonberries.
- Some vinegar in the dough or baking stock might add a nice counterpart for the sweet syrup. Ketjap Manis can also be used instead of syrup, it adds some Oriental twist.
