Sweet and Sour

I’ve been helping to can produce from a friend’s garden of green beans, tomatoes, corn, and peppers, she also has heads of cabbage that she’s started to make sauerkraut. Homemade sauerkraut has a completely different taste than the cans kraut that fill shelves in the local grocery. It’s less sour with the cabbage flavor more prevalent. Her making sauerkraut stirred several memories that caused me to recall my father-in-law’s yearly making of “kraut.” Bud Morrison and his wife Retha Johnson Morrison grew cabbages in their garden along with other vegetables. He would use an antique mandoline cabbage slicer to shred the heads. A mandoline is a wooden board with a sharp metal blade embedded in the surface that slices the cabbage as the head is pushed down the board. The shredded cabbage would then be packed into a large ceramic crock, then Bud would pour in enough saline brine to cover the strips of raw cabbage. He would cover it with a clean cloth to protect it from dust and insects. An old dinner plate and a heavy rock would press down on the cabbage. The rock itself was unusual. It looked like pale sandstone with small smooth, quartz-looking pebbles embedded in it. As the cabbage fermented, it would make its own broth and frothy bubbles would escape. He’d allow the cabbage to ferment for a week to two weeks before placing the kraut into jars and “cold packing” it.

My second kraut story involves my wife Cindy Morrison Beck’s schoolmate and best friend with her family. I’m just using her initials; D. D. and her husband had three children. Their family was the same size as my wife Cindy and me. We would spend many Christmas and New Year celebrations, together visiting each other’s homes. D. D. slowly began to conform her cooking food to the way her husband’s mother’s recipes. Eventually, there wasn’t a sour thing on her table. She added sugar to the mashed potatoes as well as to any kind of chip or pretzel dip. It was so sweet; it could have been used as a topping for a fruit salad. Here’s where the “UN-sauerkraut” enters the story. Western Pennsylvania tradition requires pork and sauerkraut to be eaten for the New Year’s celebration. It is supposed to bring “good luck.” When we shared a meal with D. D. with her as hostess, the “sauerkraut” was brown from the brown sugar she added. There was no sour taste left in the sauerkraut to be eaten with the sugar laden mashed potatoes. D. D. is a good cook, but the sweet notes in her meals were a little bit fortissimo.