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Sauer Kraut, to Cook
Lay a good-sized piece of butter in a saucepan, and let it melt. Put in half the sauer kraut, and lay on this the meat to be made ready with it: either ham or bacon smoked and pared, pork, or any sort of sausage. Over all place the other half of the kraut, pour in a glassful of white wine, and add a little water occasionally to moisten it. Cover the saucepan closely, and let the contents stew gently till the sauer kraut is soft and yellow. When cooked enough, take out the meat. Dredge in a table-spoonful of flour, let the kraut stew half an hour longer, then place the meat again in the saucepan to get quite hot. Stir the kraut now and then with a wooden spoon, and take care that it does not burn. What is left over of the sauer kraut is good warmed up on the following day or a day or two after; it may be served with some other meat. As an accompaniment to smoked meats, roast pork, sausages, etc., sauer kraut may be prepared in the way just described, but without the meat; if so, stir in a thickening of flour and butter before sending to table. It is to be observed that sauer kraut can hardly be cooked too much. It requires at first from two and a half to three hours' stewing.
A plain Central European braise of kraut and cured pork, written for an open range. The method holds up unchanged; only the vessel and a few measures need translating.
- The hinge: long, gentle, coveredThe final line is the important one — sauerkraut can hardly be overcooked, and it wants two and a half to three hours at a bare simmer. Rushed kraut stays sharp and stringy; properly stewed it turns soft, faintly sweet and the pale gold the recipe calls "yellow."
- A glassful of white wineThe recipe gives no measure. A Victorian wine glass is conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz; for a full pan of kraut a generous half cup (4 fl oz) is a reasonable reading. Anything dry and unoaked works — Riesling, Sylvaner, or a dry cider.
- Draining and rinsingModern packaged sauerkraut varies enormously in salt and acidity. Squeeze it out, and if it is aggressively sour give it one rinse in cold water before it goes in the pan; note that the recipe adds no salt of its own, the cured meat supplying it.
- The meat"Ham or bacon smoked and pared" means a piece of cured pork in one lump, not rashers — a smoked hock, a slab of unsliced bacon, or a piece of smoked shoulder. For the sausage, a coarse smoked kielbasa or a Montbeliard-style saucisse suits it better than a fresh breakfast sausage, which will fall apart over three hours.
- Heat and vesselA heavy lidded casserole or Dutch oven is safer than a thin saucepan for this length of time. If the burner will not go low enough to stop the bottom catching, move it to a 300F oven and check the moisture every 45 minutes.
- The flourDredging a spoonful of flour straight into hot kraut will give lumps unless it is scattered while stirring hard. The variant at the end — "a thickening of flour and butter" — is unspecified, but taken either as a kneaded beurre manié or a cooked roux and whisked in, it is the easier route to the same result.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; about 2 lb of kraut with a pound or so of cured pork will feed four as a main dish. The recipe is explicit that what is left over is good warmed up a day or two later, served with some other meat.
Sauerkraut is salt-fermented white cabbage, a preservation method common across Germany, Alsace, Poland and the Slavic lands, where a barrel of it carried a household through the winter; its vitamin C content is the reason it turns up in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naval provisioning as much as in domestic cookery. This treatment, kraut layered around smoked pork and stewed for hours in white wine, is essentially the same dish as Alsatian choucroute garnie. Cassell's, a late-Victorian household dictionary compiled for British kitchens, includes it under its German name with no attempt at anglicising.