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SAUER KRAUT
Slice cabbage fine on a slaw-cutter; line the bottom and sides of an oaken barrel or keg with cabbage leaves, put in a layer of the sliced cabbage about six inches in depth, sprinkle lightly with salt, and pound with a wooden beetle until the cabbage is a compact mass; add another layer of cabbage, etc., repeating the operation, pounding well each layer, until the barrel is full to within six inches of the top; cover with leaves, then a cloth, next a board cut to fit loosely on the inside of barrel, kept well down with a heavy weight. If the brine has not raised within two days, add enough water, with just salt enough to taste, to cover the cabbage; examine every two days, and add water as before, until brine raises and scum forms, when lift off cloth carefully so that the scum may adhere, wash well in several cold waters, wring dry and replace, repeating this operation as the scum arises, at first every other day, and then once a week, until the aceteous fermentation ceases, which will take from three to six weeks. Up to this time keep warm in the kitchen, then remove to a dry, cool cellar, unless made early in the fall, when it may be at once set in the pantry or cellar. One pint of salt to a full barrel of cabbage is a good proportion; some also sprinkle in whole black pepper. Or, to keep until summer: In April squeeze out of brine, and pack tightly with the hands, in a stone jar, with the bottom lightly sprinkled with salt; make brine enough to well cover the kraut in the proportion of a tablespoon salt to a quart of water; boil, skim, cool, and pour over; cover with cloth, then a plate, weight, and another cloth tied closely down; keep in a cool place, and it will be good in June. Neither pound nor salt the cabbage too much, watch closely, and keep clear from scum for good sauer kraut.
This is open-crock lactic fermentation on a farmhouse scale, and the single number that governs whether it succeeds or spoils — the salt — is set far below what is now considered the safe minimum. The notes below explain the method and where it fails.
- The salt is the problemA pint of dry salt weighs roughly a pound; a full barrel packed with shredded cabbage holds well over a hundred pounds. That works out to under one percent salt by weight, and the text goes further by warning against salting too much. Modern practice puts the safe range at 2 to 2.5 percent by weight, because salt at that level is the only thing suppressing spoilage organisms during the days before the lactic bacteria acidify the brine.
- Why the low salt matters hereSauerkraut is safe because it becomes acidic quickly and stays submerged in its own brine. Under-salted cabbage ferments too fast and too warm, favours the wrong organisms, and goes soft or slimy before the pH drops. There is no measured acidity check anywhere in the method — the cook is told only to watch the scum.
- The scum is not harmlessRepeatedly lifting a cloth off the surface, washing it and putting it back is a nineteenth-century way of managing surface yeasts and moulds. Current guidance is to keep the cabbage fully under brine so no surface film forms at all; a mould mat on a low-salt ferment can raise the pH at the surface and open the door to organisms the acid would otherwise hold off.
- The April repackThe second stage — squeezing the kraut out, repacking it in stone jars and covering with a boiled brine of one tablespoon salt to a quart of water — works out at roughly 1.5 to 2 percent depending on the salt used, at the low end of what is wanted, and it discards the original acidic brine that was doing the preserving work. Use a current, tested recipe if you want kraut that keeps into summer.
- An oaken barrel or kegWooden vessels were what a farm household had. Wood cannot be sanitised the way glass or food-grade plastic can, and a barrel that has held anything else, or that has dried out and cracked, harbours bacteria in the grain. The beetle is a heavy wooden pestle or mallet used to bruise the cabbage until it releases its water.
- "Aceteous fermentation"An older term covering the whole souring process — literally vinegar-making. What is actually happening is lactic, not acetic; genuine acetic fermentation needs oxygen and would mean the kraut had gone off. The three-to-six-week window reflects an uncontrolled kitchen temperature rather than a regulated one — the text itself says to keep the barrel warm in the kitchen.
- ScaleBarrels and kegs varied a good deal in size, and the recipe allows either; a full-size barrel would hold thirty gallons or so. Nothing in the method scales down cleanly, since the weight of the pack itself is part of what keeps the cabbage submerged.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the 1870s, a state whose kitchens had absorbed a great deal of German practice, and sauerkraut appears here as an ordinary autumn chore rather than a foreign dish — the name is simply German for sour cabbage. Salting and pressing cabbage to sour it is very old and widespread across Central and Eastern Europe; the frequently repeated story that it travelled west from China with the Mongols is traditional rather than documented. What the recipe records is the pre-refrigeration household calendar: cabbage cut at the end of the season, fermented warm in the kitchen where the cook could watch it daily, then carried down to a cold cellar for the winter, and repacked in stone jars in April to stretch the supply toward summer. The instruction to skim, wash and replace the cloth every other day is the clearest sign of how much attention a barrel of kraut demanded from someone standing in that kitchen.