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Sour Krout
Select solid, sound cabbage, and with a very sharp knife, shred or shave very finely. The cabbage should then be packed in a barrel in layers six inches deep; between the layers strew a handful of salt and a small teacup of carroway seeds; continue this until the barrel is filled; have it pressed very hard with a weight, put a very thick, strong cover over it, and a weight on the cover. Let the barrel remain in this way four weeks in winter, and not quite two in summer; about this length of time the cabbage will be in a state of fermentation, but not fit to use until fermentation has entirely ceased.
No vinegar used at all with this preparation. Some like mace, and allspice, and I think it a good addition. The Germans are exceedingly fond of this dish, and write souer kraut, or sauer kohl, which is sour herb, or sour cabbage.
This is a straightforward lacto-fermentation, but the original leaves out the one number that governs everything: how much salt. Work by weight and the rest follows.
- Salt by weight, not by handfulModern practice is 2 to 2.5 percent salt by the weight of the shredded cabbage — roughly 20 to 25 g per kilogram, or about 3 tablespoons of fine sea salt per 5 lb. Under about 1.5 percent the ferment turns soft and off-smelling; much above 3 percent and the lactic bacteria stall. Use non-iodised salt with no anti-caking agents.
- The brine must cover the cabbageThis is the hinge. Salting and pressing draws enough liquid out of the cabbage to submerge it within a day; anything left above the brine will mould. Weight it down and top up with a 2 percent salt solution if the level drops.
- Barrel to crock to jarA barrel took the output of a whole autumn cabbage patch. A 5-litre stoneware crock, a food-grade bucket, or even wide-mouth quart jars with fermentation lids all work. Five pounds of cabbage yields roughly two quarts of kraut.
- Six-inch layersPractical for a barrel, unnecessary in a small vessel. Toss the whole batch with the salt, let it stand twenty minutes until it weeps, then pack in handfuls, pressing each one down hard to drive out air.
- Carraway quantityA small teacup of caraway per six-inch layer is an enormous amount by current taste. One to two teaspoons per 5 lb of cabbage is more usual. Mace and allspice, if used, go in whole rather than ground so they can be fished out.
- Time and temperatureThe four-weeks-in-winter, two-in-summer split is really a temperature instruction. At 65–72F the ferment finishes in two to four weeks; a cold pantry at 55F stretches it to six or more. Slow and cool gives better texture and flavour.
- Knowing when it is doneThe book is right that it should not be eaten mid-ferment. Bubbling stops, the brine clears from cloudy to nearly translucent, and the taste is sharply sour with no fizz. Then refrigerate, where it keeps for months.
- What to rejectA white film of kahm yeast on the surface is harmless and can be skimmed. Fuzzy coloured mould, sliminess, or a putrid rather than sour smell means the batch failed — discard it rather than trying to rinse it.
Fermented cabbage is one of the oldest ways of holding a vegetable through a northern winter, and the practice reaches Central Europe long before the cookbooks that record it; versions are documented across Germany, Alsace, Poland and Russia by the early modern period. The author's gloss is broadly right — Sauerkraut is literally sour cabbage, and Sauerkohl is the same word with a northern German term for cabbage — though the spellings she gives, "souer kraut" and "sauer kohl," suggest an English writer transcribing what she heard from German-speaking neighbours rather than reading a German text. That she frames the dish as something "the Germans are exceedingly fond of" marks it as a borrowing from German-speaking households rather than part of her own inherited repertoire. The insistence that no vinegar is used is a genuine point of instruction: cooks needed telling that the real thing makes its own acid.