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Sauer Kraut
Place a pound of sliced fresh pork in a vessel and add a quart of sauer kraut; cover with water and boil for ten minutes. Put in the cooker and allow it to remain for six hours.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the pot is brought to a hard boil on the stove, then transferred to an insulated box that holds the heat while the pork slowly tenderizes. Almost everything that can go wrong here goes wrong in the first ten minutes, so treat the boil as the real cooking step.
- What a fireless cooker isAn insulated wooden or metal chest packed with hay, felt or ground cork, sometimes with a preheated soapstone disc. It cooks nothing on its own; it only slows the loss of heat the food already has. The nearest modern equivalent is a heavy Dutch oven in a low oven, or a slow cooker on low.
- The boil is not optionalTen minutes at a full rolling boil, with the vessel filled close to the top and the lid tight, is what charges the cooker. A partly filled pot or a simmer instead of a boil means the contents coast down through lukewarm for hours.
- Check the temperature at the endSix hours in an insulated box gives no guarantee about the final temperature. If you improvise a cooker rather than using an oven or slow cooker, take the temperature of the pork before serving; it should read 145F or above, and anything that has drifted into the tepid range should be discarded rather than reheated.
- "Fresh pork"Uncured, unsmoked pork, as distinct from the salt pork and bacon also common in larders of the period. Sliced shoulder or country-style ribs suit this best; modern loin chops are too lean and will be dry and stringy after six hours.
- A quart of sauerkrautRoughly two pounds, about one standard 32-ounce jar or one bag of refrigerated kraut, drained. Barrel kraut may well have been saltier than what is sold now; taste it, and rinse only if it is aggressively salty, since the brine is most of the seasoning in a dish with no other flavoring.
- Cover with water, lightlyEnough to submerge, no more. The kraut and pork both give up liquid, and a flooded pot dilutes the dish to a thin sour broth.
- Leave it shutOpening a fireless cooker mid-cook vents the stored heat and there is no way to put it back. The same discipline applies to a slow cooker lid.
- YieldThree to four servings. Boiled or mashed potatoes are the standard accompaniment, and the recipe gives no pepper or caraway, both of which are worth adding.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between about 1905 and the end of the First World War, and this cookbook carries a section of it. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range heated the whole kitchen and had to be tended, so bringing a pot to the boil and then shutting it in a hay-packed box for the afternoon saved both fuel and attention, and it was promoted heavily during the wartime conservation campaigns. Pork and sauerkraut is the obvious candidate for the method, being a long, forgiving braise from the Pennsylvania German and broader Central European kitchen, where the shredded salt-fermented cabbage was a winter vegetable staple; the pairing with fresh pork at the turn of the year is traditionally tied to hog-killing season. It is worth noting that the same wartime years that popularized the fireless cooker also produced the brief attempt to rename sauerkraut "liberty cabbage"; this book, for its part, keeps to "sauer kraut."