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Chou-Croute
Take as many white September cabbages as you wish, trim them, cut in halves, remove the stalks, wash them very thoroughly and shred them pretty finely. Procure an earthenware crock and put in a layer of cabbage, sprinkle it with coarse salt, whole pepper, and juniper berries. Fill up the crock in this way, put on the lid, and keep it down closely with weights. It will be ready in about six weeks' time, when the fermentation has taken place. It is good with pork or bacon.
This is sauerkraut, and the method is sound in outline, but the single number that governs whether it ferments or rots is missing. As written it should not be attempted; a current tested recipe with weighed salt is the right starting point.
- The salt is unmeasuredSafe lactic fermentation of cabbage depends on a salt concentration held within a narrow band, weighed against the trimmed cabbage. "Sprinkle it with coarse salt" gives no ratio, and too little salt allows spoilage organisms and moulds to outcompete the lactobacilli that make the process self-preserving.
- No temperature is givenFermentation rate and safety both hang on ambient temperature. A cool Belgian larder in autumn is not a modern heated kitchen, and "about six weeks" assumes conditions the recipe never states.
- Submersion is assumed, not instructedThe weighted lid is meant to press brine up over the shreds so nothing sits in air. The text does not say to check that the cabbage stays covered, nor what to do if it does not, which is a common cause of failure.
- "White September cabbages"Late-season dense white cabbage, the sort sold as Dutch or storage cabbage. The month marks the harvest season; such cabbage is generally denser and reckoned better suited to keeping and fermenting.
- The earthenware crockPeriod crocks varied: salt-glazed stoneware, unglazed earthenware, and lead-glazed wares were all in use. Old or imported glazed vessels can leach lead into an acidic ferment; only modern food-grade stoneware, glass or food-grade plastic is appropriate for anything acidic held for weeks.
- Juniper and whole pepperBoth are traditional Belgian and Alsatian seasonings for kraut and contribute the resinous note expected in choucroute garnie. At these quantities they are essentially flavouring; the preservation is done by the salt and the acid.
- "Good with pork or bacon"Kraut was commonly rinsed and then braised for an hour or more with fat pork, bacon or sausage; in French that garnished version is choucroute garnie, while choucroute alone names the cabbage.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and it reads as an attempt to keep a national kitchen alive in exile. Chou-croute sits at the border of that kitchen in every sense: the word is generally said to have reached French through the Alsatian dialect form, with the chou-/-croute shape a later reshaping, and the dish belongs to a broad band running from Alsace through the Low Countries into Germany and Poland where cabbage was the vegetable that got a household through winter. Salting shredded cabbage to preserve it is very old and generally traced in Europe to the late medieval period, though similar practice is often said to be older still in central Asia. The juniper berries and whole peppercorns layered in with the salt, and the plain assumption at the end that it will be served against pork or bacon, the fat and the acid balancing each other in the way that defines the whole family of dishes.