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Sauer Kraut
(Germany.) Shred finely 3 white cabbages, add 1 ounce of salt, 1 cup of water, and 1/2 spoonful of cream of tartar. Cover and mash, keep it under a weight,in a warm place. In 3 weeks it will be ready for use. It must be cooked several hours before serving, and eaten with bacon, or small sausages.
This is a home fermentation with no weighed salt-to-cabbage ratio, no stated temperature, and an additive that works against the process. Sauerkraut is safe only because a correct brine concentration keeps lactic acid bacteria in charge; this formula does not guarantee that.
- The salt is far too lowThree white cabbages weigh roughly 6 to 9 lb trimmed. Safe kraut runs about 2 to 2.5 percent salt by weight of shredded cabbage, which would be 2 to 3.5 oz. One ounce is roughly 0.7 to 1 percent, well under the usual range and low enough that spoilage organisms and moulds may outcompete the lactobacilli.
- The added water dilutes the brine furtherProperly salted cabbage draws its own liquid out under weight, and no water is needed. A cup of added water lowers the salt concentration in the brine at exactly the moment it needs to be highest, in the first days before acidity builds.
- Cream of tartar has no place hereCream of tartar is potassium bitartrate, an acid salt used in baking. It contributes nothing to a lactic fermentation and does not substitute for the acidity the bacteria must produce themselves. Its presence in the recipe suggests a confusion of chemical souring with fermentation.
- "A warm place" is not a temperatureKraut ferments reliably around 65 to 72F. Much warmer and it softens, goes off-smelling, and can spoil before it acidifies; much cooler and it stalls. A warm corner of an unheated period kitchen and a modern heated room are not the same thing, and the recipe gives no way to tell.
- "Cover and mash, keep it under a weight"The intent is right, the detail is missing. All cabbage must stay below the brine for the entire three weeks, and nothing here specifies a follower plate, a fully submerging weight, or what to do if the liquid never rises high enough to cover, which it very likely will not at this salt level.
- Judging it by look and smell is not sufficientFinished kraut should be sour, pale, and crisp, with clean acidity. But with the brine this weak, an off batch can develop yeasts, kahm, or mould without being obvious throughout the jar. Use a current sauerkraut recipe that gives salt as a percentage of the weighed cabbage.
- On the long cookingLong boiling of kraut with bacon or sausage is found in older German cooking and is not a safety issue; it mellows the acidity and melts the fat through. Modern German recipes more often give it 30 to 60 minutes.
Sauerkraut is one of the oldest surviving examples of lactic fermentation as household preservation: salt draws water from shredded cabbage, the resulting brine excludes air, and naturally present lactobacilli acidify it into something that keeps through winter. Though the name is German and the dish is bound up with German and Alsatian cooking, fermented cabbage has a much longer and wider history across northern and eastern Europe and into Asia. Its appearance as a brief entry, a paragraph apiece, is typical of national dishes presented in shorthand, aimed at cooks who were expected to fill in the technique from experience. The gaps here, no weighed salt ratio and no temperature, are exactly the gaps that made such abbreviated recipes workable for someone who had watched kraut made and unreliable for anyone who had not, and it is the reason modern fermentation instructions insist on percentages rather than counting heads of cabbage.