The Road From Poland to Thailand Might Run Through Persia

I recently attended a dinner where Polish grandmothers cooked gołąbki (roughly pronounced "gwolm-ki," from what I recall), a traditional Polish cabbage roll dish. The food was great, but reading about the theories behind the dish's etymology sent me into a bit of a rabbit hole:

"[While] Gołąbki is the plural form of gołąbek, the diminutive form of gołąb ("pigeon, dove"), [the Polish linguist Marek Stachowski] proposes an Oriental borrowing, pointing out that a similar dish, aside from Eastern Europe, is known in the Levant and Central Asia. He mentions Persian کلم kalam "cabbage" or کلم پیچ‎ kalam pič "cabbage roll" and Old Armenian կաղամբ kałamb "cabbage" as possible sources.""

Like Stachowski's proposed etymology for gołąbki, the word for "cabbage" in Thai กะหล่ำปลี ka-lǎm-plii also sounds like the Persian word کلم kalam. I've only (deliberately) come across a handful of Persian loanwords in Thai and don't recall seeing the word for "cabbage" mentioned in any loanword lists¹, so it was nice to confirm the connection after finding this page and article – the latter of which notes:

"The Thai words for “cabbage,” kalam plii, and “cauliflower,” kalam dork, contain the Persian loanword kalam, “cabbage.” The Persian word for “cauliflower” is gol-e kalam, literally “the flower of the cabbage” which is the exact meaning of the Thai equivalent kalam dork."

It's well-established that the Thai language is full of loanwords², and it's easy to identify loanwords from languages that heavily influenced it. However, it's more fun to trace the history of words that don't have such an obvious connection (probably because I'm not an expert in Old Persian, either) - and even more enjoyable when food from a completely unrelated culture leads you to stumble into the connection.