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Boiled Sourcrout
To prepare the sourcrout for boiling soak it in plenty of cold water until it is only palatably salty, put it over the fire in a saucepan of boiling water, or in the same pot in which bacon, pickled pork, or smoked sausages are boiling, and boil until it is tender. To serve the sourcrout drain it, put it on a dish, lay the meat on it, and serve them together. When it is cooked without meat it is simply served as a vegetable. When cold it may be chopped and fried in butter, or heated in white sauce or some gravy.
A method rather than a formula, and it assumes barrel kraut far saltier and more sour than the bagged or canned product sold today. Adjust the soaking to the kraut you actually have.
- Soaking is optional nowOscar's "soak in plenty of cold water until only palatably salty" was written for kraut fermented in heavy brine and sold from the crock. Modern refrigerated or jarred sauerkraut rarely needs more than a rinse in a colander, and canned kraut usually needs none at all — taste it first and soak only if it is aggressively salty.
- SourcroutSimply an older English spelling of the German Sauerkraut. Nothing is different about the product.
- "Boil until tender"Fresh-fermented cabbage from a barrel may well have needed an hour or more, though Oscar gives no time. Commercial kraut is already soft; 20 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer is enough to mellow the acidity and pick up flavour from the pot. Hard boiling drives off aroma and turns the shreds to threads.
- Cooking in the meat potThis is the hinge of the dish. Kraut simmered in the water with bacon, pickled pork or smoked sausage takes up the fat and smoke; kraut boiled in plain water is a much thinner thing. If you cook it separately, add a piece of smoked bacon or a ham hock to the pan.
- Salt pork and pickled porkBacon and pickled pork -- Both are heavily brine-cured. If you use them, there is no need to add salt to the kraut water; taste the finished dish before adjusting.
- The cold leftoversChopped and fried in butter, cooked kraut browns and sweetens usefully — closer to a hash than a pickle. The white sauce (or gravy) treatment Oscar also allows is little seen today; the fried version is the one worth repeating.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Reckon about 2 lb of drained kraut for four people as a vegetable, or the same amount under a pound and a half of boiled sausage or pork as a main dish.
Sauerkraut reached American tables through German immigration, and by the time Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf in the 1890s it was thoroughly at home in New York, where the German-speaking population was among the largest of any city outside Europe. What is telling here is how little apology the entry makes: no explanation of what the stuff is, no attempt to dress it up for a luxury hotel, just the assumption that a cook knows barrel kraut and knows to boil it with the pork. The instruction to soak it points to a product that arrived salted for keeping rather than pasteurised in a jar — the fermenting crock, not the cannery, was still the normal source. Serving the meat laid on a bed of the kraut, rather than beside it, is a common German presentation and remains so.