Mad about hue

Ma’am Zony was our high-school choir mistress. Yes, I was once in a choir, even though I was (still am) tone deaf. But choir membership meant exemption from physical education class, which I loathed with every lazy bone of my 90-pound body, and if I had to move heaven and earth to get into the club, well then so be it.

Not that I had to. I was friends with Ma’am Zony’s youngest daughter, a fact that outweighed my musical limitations. Ma’am was no fool, but she had a soft spot for losers. Once you saw past the piano-banging and the smoke (for she smoked a lot), she was all heart: Corazon was her given name.

To the rest of the campus, though, she was simply The Violet Lady. Boy did she love that color. From her car to her clothes, she was a walking monument to purple-mania.

As it were, her name became practically synonymous with the color. “That’s a Ma’am Zony!” we would say of a purple shirt, for example. Admittedly such occasions became increasingly rare, because as if by some unspoken consensus, people avoided wearing anything in that spectrum, making Ma’am Zony stand out all the more. I think she even wrote in purple ink — or maybe I just imagined that she did.

Which made my first encounter with purple cabbage a pure Ma’am Zony moment. “It’s a Ma’am Zony cabbage!” I told the cook, who had no idea what I was on about. Of course some people will insist that it’s red, not purple, but who are they kidding? I may not be able to carry a tune but my vision is perfectly fine, thank you. That, my friend, is not red. As for the violet-versus-purple debate, I won’t even go there, knowing that Ma’am wouldn’t, too. Let’s just say that whatever shade that color came in (and however you may choose to call it), she was into it and that was that.

Now it occurs to me that I have no idea if Ma’am’s obsession also extended to food. All I know is that she ate like a bird and seemed to subsist solely on SkyFlakes and Philip Morris, but I can imagine her being partial to ube (purple yam) ice cream, serving lots of eggplant-based dishes at home, gorging on lomboy (Java plum) — you get the picture. And then there’s braised purple cabbage, which I have no problem imagining on my table. It’s a visual stunner that pairs well with any meat of your choice. It’s sweet and sour, crunchy and a bit nutty. Just count on some hesitation when you ask people to try it. That purple looks radioactive, after all.

On a lark, I decided to do a fan count on Facebook, where you can be a fan of anything, even root canal surgery. Red/purple cabbage, I learned, has 145 fans. Eggplant, food category, has 176; grocery category, 911. By contrast, the garishly hued kwek-kwek (although neither purple nor a vegetable) has 21,932. The day they dip purple cabbage in nuclear-orange batter and deep-fry it will be the day that —

But that’s not going to happen, is it? What can happen is for you to pick up a purple globe on your next trip to the market, slice it finely, wash and drain well, and boil in a solution made of one cup water and half a cup each of vinegar and sugar (plus salt and pepper to taste) until most of the liquid has evaporated — about 45 minutes to an hour. That’s it. Serve hot or cold. Like any good side dish, it complements any entrée without calling too much attention to itself.

Save for that screaming color, of course. But can you blame that cabbage, any more than you could fault Ma’am Zony for painting her lips and nails purple? The fact is neither you nor I have any say on the matter, and if you can’t deal with it then I’m sorry to inform you that you’re bound to see more — much, much more — interesting things in this wonderfully crazy world, and wish you all the luck that’s in it.