I was thinking of doing this, as it would avoid the problem of split cabbage leaves.
I already do this for enchiladas. I make up the meat mixture, and the bean mix, and the sauce, and layer them with flat tortillas. While it doesn’t look the same as regular rolled up enchiladas, everyone loves this dish. I call it Mexican Lasagna, or Latin Lasagna.
Yeah, I go the layered cabbage casserole route, too, when I’m in the mood for cabbage rolls. Otherwise, I just wait for my mom to make them.
One more tip: you can also soften the cabbage leaves for the rolls by freezing and thawing them.
The Polish side of my family made these when I was a kid and the recipe has been lost, but I played around a little to reproduce it.
I agree with those who say to put the whole cabbage in boiling water and take off leaves as they soften. It’s just my wife and I eating these, so even if I plan to freeze a lot of leftovers, we rarely need more than about the outer half of the cabbage and the core is great for other dishes.
I cook the rice ahead of time and leave the meat raw. Raw rice takes a lot longer to cook, and came out dry when I tried it… with no benefit in flavor that I could discern. I do add an egg or two, as if I was making meat balls.
I like adding diced onion to the rice and meat mixture, but it’s not “traditional.”
For the seasonings, I keep it to salt, pepper, garlic, thyme and sage. They’re meant to be a little bland in the traditional way, but you really can’t go wrong by experimenting to your own tastes. Worcestershire sauce adds a nice touch.
For the tomato sauce, my preference is to whole whole/diced canned tomatoes that I whiz up in my blender. That way, I know I’m not dealing with added flavors. Also, the result is a sauce with a different consistency than actual tomato sauce. It’s closer to what I grew up with and so I like that. (Plus, I buy cans of diced tomatoes for soup in bulk at Costco and so I always have these on hand.)
Flavor the tomato sauce lightly with the same seasoning you used in the meat. I add a little bit of beef broth base too.
I don’t think you need to serve anything else with these to make a complete meal. When we had our family feasts, we always served a big spread buffet-style, so you had choices of all kinds of dishes. When we’ve done them for my wife and I, I often think of the meal in terms of courses rather than main/side dishes. So start with a soup. Move on to salad. Have the cabbage rolls. Finish with desert. But, it also works fine to just sit down to a big plate of the rolls and enjoy them.
Sour cream is the obvious topping of choice. The only Eastern European food that doesn’t have a sour cream garnish on top is the sour cream. 
Oh, they freeze very well. So you might as well cook up 20 pounds at a time and have quick dinners ready all winter.
Do not. I invented it. 
Yeah, well I mentioned it first on this board in 2011. 
There’s a traditional dish in Hungary (and parts of Transylvania) called rakott káposzta that is a layered cabbage, meat, and rice casserole. Here’s a typical recipe, if anyone is interested. It is also commonly made with sauerkraut.
I don’t know what you mean by that. I just checked my Polish cookbook collection, and both Polish and English recipes on the internet, and nearly all of them have onion in them for “traditional” golabki.
As far as spicing goes, Polish spicing is typically pretty straightforward: salt & pepper. Maybe paprika. Maybe marjoram. Maybe caraway seed. (We only did salt & pepper). And, these days, maybe this Croatian bouillon type of thing called “Vegeta.”
I might have been misremembering then, or I just happened to chance across a few recipes that didn’t have it and made an incorrect assessment of traditional.
It would have been nice to have learned some of these recipes directly from a few members of that side of the family, but I never had that chance.
My grandmother’s recipe uses a tomato-based sauce, too, but made sweet-and-sour by adding some golden raisins, some whole-berry cranberry sauce, and a bit of ginger (powdered). Reminds me that I haven’t made them in forever, and damn, now I want them!
This recipe has the right general idea, but Grandmom would never use prunes or anywhere near that amount of brown sugar. And powdered ginger instead of gingersnaps is probably my own modification.
Similar to Ellen Cherry’s laziness ;), my wife does something she calls “Unrolled cabbage rolls” or “Unstuffed cabbage.”
She takes all the ingredients (chunked raw cabbage, cooked ground beef, canned tomatoes, diced onions) and plops it into a crock pot for several hours with the salt, pepper and garlic seasoning. She adds cooked rice for the last 20 minutes and mixes it in.
She then slops it on plates, and says “Dinner is served” with a real lazy Polish accent. It’s always a phenomenal night at the Lendervedder house when this is on the table.