Home › Vegetables › Sauer Kraut (Grease a casserole Put)
Sauer Kraut (Grease a casserole Put)
Grease a casserole. Put in a layer of kraut, core an apple and slice over kraut. Sprinkle 2T brown sugar over apple, then fill up the casserole with kraut and place pork chops on top, salt, pepper and 1 cup water. Bake 1½ hours.
Florence Lovell.
A one-dish supper of the sort that fills the vegetable chapter of midcentury church cookbooks: sauerkraut sweetened with apple and brown sugar, with chops browning on top as the kraut steams beneath. The original gives no oven temperature, no pan size and no quantity of kraut, so a few decisions have to be made before it goes in.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated. A moderate oven, 350F, is a reasonable choice; at that heat 1½ hours covered suits a full dish, the chops should reach 145F on an instant-read thermometer and the kraut should be tender rather than crunchy.
- What "casserole" means hereIn American usage of this period the word covers the baking dish. A 2-quart covered dish, or a 9-inch square pan with foil, will hold two to four chops.
- Quantity of krautUnspecified. A 2-quart dish takes roughly two pounds, or two 14-ounce cans, drained. Buy refrigerated bagged kraut if you can; it has more character than the shelf-stable canned sort.
- Drain, and taste before you saltCanned and bagged sauerkraut carry a great deal of brine. Drain well and, if your kraut is aggressively sour, rinse briefly. The recipe's instruction to salt should be applied to the chops only, and lightly.
- T means tablespoonThe abbreviations in these club books are inconsistent, but 2T here is two tablespoons of brown sugar, which with a tart apple is enough to round the acid without making the dish sweet.
- The appleCored and sliced, skin on or off as you like. A firm cooking apple holds its shape through 1½ hours; a soft eating apple will melt into the kraut, which is not a failure, only a different dish.
- Brown the chops firstNot in the original, but worth two minutes a side in a hot skillet. Chops laid raw on wet kraut and baked covered come out pale and steamed. Thick bone-in chops survive the long bake far better than thin ones, which will be dry well before the kraut is done.
- Cover, then uncoverBake covered for most of the time so the cup of water and the kraut's own liquid keep everything moist, then pull the lid for the last 15 minutes to color the meat.
- YieldServes four with potatoes or rye bread. It reheats better than it bakes; the kraut mellows overnight.
Sauerkraut with apple and pork is a German and Alsatian pairing that traveled to the American Midwest with nineteenth-century immigration. Apple and brown sugar are a common American softening of a sharply fermented cabbage. Fermenting cabbage in salt is old and widespread, generally traced in Europe to the late medieval period and older in Asia; commercially canned kraut, widely available from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is presumably what a recipe this brief assumes.