From The New York Times cooking section by Sam Sifton:

Good morning. I dropped by a friend’s house the other day and found her cooking a Swedish kalpudding, a kind of cabbage meatloaf: layers of butter-sautéed cabbage and ground beef cut through with bread crumbs and cream. It smelled fantastic. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to make it right away.

Now I have, and now I think you should, too, an early-week no-recipe recipe that you could knock down on a Monday night with ease.

You’ll need: a small green cabbage and a big knob of unsalted butter. Also: a pound of ground pork or a mixture of ground beef and pork; a small onion, peeled and diced; a cup of cream; a few tablespoons of bread crumbs; and (two cool additions I picked up from reading the chef Magnus Nilsson’s version of the dish in “The Nordic Cook Book“) a healthy pour of golden syrup and a splash of soy sauce.

Shred the cabbage and caramelize it in a pan with the butter and the golden syrup (use a mixture of molasses and light corn syrup if you can’t find golden, or a spray of brown sugar, or just omit because we shouldn’t be eating so much sugar, anyway). Let it get really tantalizingly close to burned. Then mix about a third of that with the meat, onion, cream, bread crumbs and soy sauce, along with some salt and pepper, and mold it all into a buttered loaf pan. Top with the remaining caramelized cabbage, and bake in a 350-degree oven for about 45 minutes.

Serve with boiled potatoes and some lingonberry jam. If you don’t like it, I’ll fashion a hat out of beef liver and eat it with onions.