Home › Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling › Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Potatoes
Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Potatoes
To Store Potatoes. -Potatoes are usually stored in bins or barrels in a dark cellar. They should not be left in the field any longer than is necessary to dry them after being dug, as they are injured by exposure to direct sunshine. It is advisable to cover the bottom of the bin or barrel with a layer of fine, dry sand, throw over the top a piece of burlap and place a layer of sand on this. They should be examined once or twice a month during the winter, and if they commence to rot should be picked over, care being taken to handle them carefully so as not to bruise them. To Keep Potatoes from Sprouting.
To keep old potatoes not intended for seed from withering and sprouting, place them in a sack or handled basket and lower them into boiling water for a minute or two, moving them about so that the water will reach all parts of the surface. Lay them out on a flat surface to dry thoroughly before storing them away.
The boiling water kills the germs.
Potatoes thus treated will continue practically as good as new until new potatoes come in. By this process old potatoes can be held over until the market price is at its height.
Or they can be preserved for domestic use when there are only new potatoes at high prices on the market.
To Store Sweet Potatoes. - Pack in boxes or barrels on a very hot day in summer in clean, dry sand. Take care that the potatoes do not touch one another, and place in a dry storeroom where the temperature will range between 40° and 60° F. Care must be taken not to bruise them, and they must be bone dry when packed.
Small quantities procured from dealers in winter may be kept in sand near the kitchen stove, or in any warm, dry place.
To Store Cabbage. -Cabbages are not injured by frost, but wither and wilt in a drying heat. Hence they should be kept in a cool, dark, and moist place, but must not be kept in standing water, as it injures their flavor, or packed together, else they will heat and rot.
Cut them before the severe fall frosts, leaving about 2 inches or more of the stem attached. Let the outside leaves remain on. Tie a strong cord about the stalks, and hang them from the timbers of the ceiling of a cool, dry cellar, heads downward.
Several cabbages may be suspended on one cord one above another, and in this way a large number can be stored in an ordinary cellar, just enough space being left among them to admit of a circulation of air.
Or pack in sawdust in large casks or packing cases. Take care to have a layer of several inches of sawdust between the cabbages and the box.
Put them in any outhouse and let them freeze. Sawdust being a nonconductor, they will not thaw out until spring, and will not be injured. Or cabbages may be stored out of doors by loosening the earth about the roots and pulling them up without shaking off the dirt which adheres. Now set them out in furrows, burying the roots just as they grow up to the head in soil. Let the heads touch. Drive posts in the ground, build a shed roof over them of rough boards or poles high enough so that there will be circulation of air between the roof and the cabbages, and cover the roof with corn fodder or straw. Pack straw or meadow hay around the sides to keep out the snow, and let them freeze. They will keep green and fresh all winter. - Sauerkraut. Sauerkraut consists of sliced cabbage laid down between layers of common salt-at the rate of about one pint of salt to a barrel of cabbage-in a wooden tub or firkin, and with the addition of black pepper, anise, mustard, caraway, or celery seed if desired. Thoroughly scald the tub, firkin, or cask. Remove the outer leaves of the cabbage and use them to line the cask. Slice the heart of the cabbage fine by means of a slaw cutter or sharp knife. Place a layer of clean leaves on the bottom of the cask.
Sprinkle over them a small handful of salt and put in a layer of sliced cabbage about 6 inches in depth, using the outer leaves as a lining to keep the sliced cabbage from the sides of the cask. Sprinkle over the cab- PRESERVATION OF MEAT AND VEGETABLES 711 bage a small handful of salt, and by means of a wooden beetle or the end of a round stick of hard wood, pound the cabbage until it is a solid mass, or until the juice just makes its appearance, but do not pound or salt the cabbage too much. Now add another layer of cabbage and another handful of salt, and SO continue pounding down each layer solidly until the cask is nearly full.
Cover the top over with the loose outer leaves, and lay over these several thicknesses of cheese cloth. Lay on a loose cover of boards and on this a weight of stone equal to 25 or 30 pounds. Let the cask stand in a warm place for three or four weeks, during which it will ferment and give off at first a very disagreeable odor.
After forty-eight hours, if brine has not been formed, add a little salt water, about as salt as tears, to cover the cabbage. After two days more, add more salt water, if necessary, until brine forms over the top of the board cover and a scum appears.
Remove the cloth cover, taking the brine with it, rinse thoroughly in cold water, wring dry, and return to its place. Continue to do this every few days until it ceases to ferment.
This will require four or five weeks.
It is then ready for use and may be stored in any cool, dark place.
Sauerkraut is usually made in the fall for winter use, but if it is desired to keep what is left for use in summer, squeeze out the brine through cheese cloth. Select a suitable earthenware jar, sprinkle the bottom with salt and pack the sauerkraut in this.
Make a brine by dissolving 1 tablespoonful of salt to a quart of coid water. Bring to a boil over a slow fire removing the scum as it rises. Set aside to cool and pour over the sauerkraut. Lay over the top several thicknesses of cheese cloth, and tie over the jar a piece of cotton batting.
This will keep until the hottest days of summer.
Cauliflower. In a well-drained part of the garden dig a ditch 12 or 15 inches deep and 12 inches wide.
Pack the cauliflowers in this with the roots down and cover with earth up to the heads. Fill the trench with hay or straw 6 or 8 inches thick, and weight it down with stone, earth, or boards.
Or pack the cauliflowers on the cellar bottom, burying the roots and stalks in earth. In this way they can be kept until the 1st of March or later.
This is a cellar-management chapter rather than a cookbook page, and only the sauerkraut is a recipe in the usual sense. Its salt ratio is the problem, and most of the storage advice assumes an unheated stone cellar that no modern house has.
- The salt is far too lowA pint of salt is roughly a pound; a full barrel of packed cabbage runs to 150-200 lb. That is well under one per cent salt by weight, and "do not salt the cabbage too much" pushes it lower still. Below the tested range, lactic fermentation does not dominate reliably and the crock can go soft, slimy or mouldy instead of souring. Use a current tested sauerkraut recipe with weighed salt.
- "As salt as tears" is not a measurementThe phrase means faintly saline, somewhere near one per cent, but it is an impression rather than a figure. Topping up a ferment with guessed brine dilutes whatever salinity the crock had achieved, which is the opposite of what a safe ferment needs.
- "A warm place" for three to four weeksThe recipe gives no temperature at all to work from, and "warm" in a period house without central heating is unlikely to have meant a modern kitchen at 72-75F, where the ferment will run much faster and much less predictably.
- Firkin, beetle, cheese clothA firkin is a small wooden cask, historically about nine gallons. A beetle is a heavy wooden pounding mallet. Cheese cloth of this period was generally a closer, heavier weave than the loose gauze sold under that name now; a clean cotton tea towel is probably nearer the original.
- The scum ritualRinsing and returning the cloth every few days was the era's usual defence against surface yeasts and moulds. It is labour-intensive and imperfect, which is why modern practice keeps the cabbage fully submerged under its own brine with a weight and an airlock or loose lid instead.
- Sweet potato temperature is wrongThe 40-60F range given here is too cold at the bottom end. Sweet potatoes suffer chilling injury below about 55F, which causes internal discoloration and off flavours. Warm, dry and around 55-60F is the target, and they should be cured warm and humid for a week or so first.
- The boiling-water dip for potatoesScalding tubers to check sprouting is sound in principle -- it kills the sprout buds near the surface -- but it also breaks the skin's defences, and any potato left damp afterwards will rot. "Dry thoroughly" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. Cold, dark storage around 45-50F is the reliable modern answer.
- Green potato skinsThe warning against sunlight is not only about wilting. Light exposure builds solanine, which is bitter and mildly toxic; the greening is chlorophyll, but it flags the alkaloid. Discard heavily greened or sprouted potatoes rather than trimming and hoping.
- Freezing cabbage in sawdustThis works only where cabbage freezes once in late autumn and stays frozen. A cycle of thaws and refreezes, which is now the normal winter in much of the temperate world, will turn the heads to slime.
Sauerkraut reached American cellars mainly through German-speaking immigrants, and by the time this book was compiled it was so ordinary a winter staple that the author could dispose of it in a single unbroken paragraph. The wider chapter is a reminder of what a household of the period actually was: a place that bought cabbage, potatoes and cauliflower by the barrel and furrow in autumn and then spent the winter managing decay, picking bins over twice a month, hanging heads from cellar joists, burying roots in trenches under straw. The remark that scalded potatoes can be "held over until the market price is at its height" also shows how thin the line was between domestic economy and small-scale speculation; a cellar was a warehouse as much as a larder. Fermentation was understood empirically rather than microbiologically here -- the book cheerfully says boiling water "kills the germs," a phrase then still relatively new -- and the salt ratios reflect taste and tradition rather than any measured understanding of what keeps a crock safe.