Cabbage dish re-created for Jewish festival

SLIDESHOW: Stuffed cabbage
Gertrude Altschull's Stuffed Cabbage

When organizers were planning last year's Jewish Food Festival at Keneseth Beth Israel, they realized they had no one to make stuffed cabbage.

"I said, 'You can't have a food festival without stuffed cabbage,'" recalled Beverley Soble. "I said, 'Let me see if I can remember my mother's recipe.'"

She pieced together the recipe from memory -- her mother died in 2005 -- and the stuffed cabbage was a big hit at last year's festival, selling out quickly.

"This year, we made three times as many," Soble said.

This year's festival has been expanded to two days and will be from noon to 7:30 p.m. Sunday and Monday at the synagogue, 6300 Patterson Ave. Besides stuffed cabbage, the festival will feature an assortment of food, including brisket, schnitzel and latkes, as well as shawarma, kugels and challah. Musical entertainment, as well as other activities, will be provided throughout the festival.

Last year, Soble called on friends to help make the stuffed cabbage.

"We had the most incredible time making it," said Soble, who works for a health-care association. "This year when I called them, they couldn't wait to come back, and we even increased the number of volunteers. They ranged in age from a 15-year-old to people over 70."

More than a dozen people helped with this year's cooking, spread over two days in the Keneseth Beth Israel kitchen.

Soble's mother, Gertrude Altschull, was a caterer in Martinsville who lived her final years in Richmond. Soble said re-creating her mother's recipe required a lot of taste-testing to make it just right.

"We had a big fight over whether to put raisins in or no raisins," she said with a laugh. "So I made an executive decision: no raisins."

Contact Bill Lohmann at (804) 649-6639 or .