Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Sourcrout with Apples
Sourcrout with Apples
Shred fine some white-hearted cabbages, peel about half the quantity of apples and slice them thin. Rub the inside of a saucepan over with butter. Put at the bottom a slice of fat bacon, then a layer of the cabbage, a small piece of butter, four or five slices of lemon, a little ground mace and pepper, two or three tablespoonfuls of vinegar, then the apples, some slices of ham and more cabbage in alternate layers. When the stewpan is full place a layer of veal fat on the top and bake all in a moderate oven for three hours. Serve on a hot dish.
Sourcrout with Goose, Roumanian Draw and wash a fat goose and season the interior of it with pepper and salt and any other kind of seasoning desired. Cut one or two cabbages into very thin shreds, and mix eighteen or twenty peppercorns with them. Put it into a baking-dish and place the goose on the top. Bake it in a moderate oven, basting occasionally with butter. When cooked place the goose on a hot dish, garnishes it with the sourcrout, and serves with a sauceboatful of good gravy.
Two related dishes run together on the page: a layered cabbage-and-apple bake and a goose roasted on a bed of shredded cabbage. Note first that despite the title, neither uses fermented sauerkraut — Oscar's "sourcrout" here is raw cabbage soured in the pan with vinegar, lemon and the apples themselves.
- The hinge: it is not krautIf you substitute jarred sauerkraut you will end up with something far more acidic and much softer after three hours. Use firm white cabbage as written and let the vinegar and lemon do the souring, or if you want true kraut, rinse it and cut the added vinegar entirely.
- Moderate oven350F. Cover the pan — three hours uncovered at that temperature will dry the top layer to leather. A lid or foil, then the last twenty minutes open if you want colour.
- Veal fatA sheet of veal caul fat or a layer of chopped veal suet, laid on top to baste the dish as it renders. Butchers rarely stock either now; sliced fatback, a few strips of streaky bacon, or a generous smear of butter under the lid does the same work.
- ProportionsApples at half the weight of cabbage is a lot of fruit and the dish reads sweet. A firm cooking apple that holds shape — Bramley, Granny Smith — is better than anything soft.
- The lemon slicesFour or five slices with peel on, buried in a covered pan for three hours, will turn the dish bitter. Peel them, or use the juice of half a lemon and a few strips of zest fished out before serving.
- Ham and baconBoth are salt-cured here and no salt is called for anywhere in the first recipe. Season only at the end, after tasting.
- The goose, unspecifiedNo time or weight is given. A 10–12 lb goose takes roughly 2½ to 3 hours at 350F; the thigh should read 165–175F. Prick the skin and there is no need to baste with butter — a goose renders more fat than the cabbage can absorb, and you should pour some off partway through.
- Peppercorns wholeEighteen or twenty whole peppercorns scattered through shredded cabbage means diners will bite one. Crack them coarsely, or tie them in muslin and remove before serving.
- YieldNo quantities are given, so this is guesswork: two medium cabbages and the corresponding apples will roughly fill a 3-quart casserole and serve about six as a side dish. A goose of the size assumed above would serve six to eight.
Cabbage cooked with apples, bacon and vinegar is Alsatian and southwest German household cooking, and it travelled into American hotel kitchens with the enormous German-speaking immigration of the mid-nineteenth century. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name fronts this 1896 volume, was assembling a working reference for a New York kitchen that had to produce French, German, Hungarian and "Roumanian" dishes on demand, which is why national labels attach so loosely here — the second recipe is a plain roast goose on cabbage, a dish claimed across most of central and eastern Europe, and the geography of the name tells you more about the Waldorf's clientele than about Romania. The spelling "sourcrout" is an anglicisation of Sauerkraut that was common in English cookbooks from the eighteenth century onward, and its use here for unfermented cabbage suggests the word had come to mean "cabbage cooked sour" as much as anything from a crock.