Sauerkraut (Served With
Pork and Black-Eyed Peas)
Recipe submitted by Joyce Young
Nationality/Ethnicity – German
The Story Behind the Recipe
Served with
mashed potatoes, pork and black-eyed peas, this traditional New Year's
Day dish guarantees good luck.
For years, many
Dayton families met together the Sunday before Labor Day to make
sauerkraut. My husband Fred and I were lucky enough to have as neighbors
in our early married life, the son and daughter of Mary and AI Trace,
who were faithful proponents of this tradition. One September Sunday in
the late 1950's, we gathered together good and faithful friends to see
if we could emulate the success of our forbearers. We were so successful
that we continued this tradition for more than thirty years, into the
1990's.
Ingredients:
Necessary Equipment:
-
A stoneware
crock of 6, 8 or 10 gallon capacity (which were available at Monkey
Miller's)
-
Old-fashioned
two- or three-foot wooden grater(s)
-
A baseball
bat or broom handle
-
A big dinner
plate or plastic bag filled with water
-
A heavy stone
or brick
Preparation
Directions:
The necessary
equipment is simple and job assignments are simple too. The most
important people are those careful with sharp knives who remove the
outer discolored leaves of the cleaned cabbage heads, and quarter and
core them. Children are great at getting the cabbage heads out of the
troughs where they've been soaking, carrying the cabbage to the graters
and finding big rocks. The bulk of the labor is done by adults seated in
lawn chairs leaning over crocks placed between their knees, trying to
grate innumerable cabbage heads into the crock without grating a finger
as well.
As soon as a
healthy layer of 3 or 4 inches of cabbage has been grated into the
crock, sprinkle, pour or shower salt on the cabbage, depending on your
inclination. Children can step up to bat for the next part of the
process, pounding the cabbage in the crock with the baseball bat or
broom handle until in becomes a little juicy. Some people believe beer
also adds flavor here.
Repeat this
procedure until the cabbage level is just about 4 inches below the top
of the crock.
The rule of
thumb is 3 tablespoons of salt to 5 pounds of cabbage. Twenty-five
pounds of cabbage will fill a 5- to 8-quart crock. After the final layer
of grated cabbage, lay several inches of discarded cabbage leaves over
the top, put a plate or big water-filled plastic bag over the leaves,
and weigh the whole mixture down with a brick or heavy rock. Over the
next two months, keep the crock as far away from people's noses as
possible. It can be very smelly, especially during hot weather. The
payoff comes at Halloween! Holding your breath, carefully scrape off the
rotted cabbage on the top. Do not give up at this point. Under
the horrible mess lie gallons and gallons of beautiful, white, delicious
sauerkraut.
There are three
theories to preserve the sauerkraut after it's been opened. Some
cookbooks recommend canning it. Another theory is to pack all of the
sauerkraut into jars to store in the refrigerator, which works if you
have a spare refrigerator with lots of room. The third, which also
works, is to leave the sauerkraut in the crock and scrape a little
unusable sauerkraut off the top whenever you want to cook some.
Sauerkraut with Pork
Ingredients:
Preparation
Directions:
Cooking the
sauerkraut is the easiest part of this process. Just put it in a
roasting pan with a pork loin or pork roast, cover it, put it in the
oven at 325 degrees and let it cook until all of your neighbors know
what you're having for dinner. Purists rinse it in a colander and add
some white wine. I always like to add a couple of cut up onions and
apples and caraway seeds.
Black-Eyed Pea Casserole
Ingredients:
-
6 strips
bacon
-
1 can (32 oz)
black eyed peas
-
1 cup chopped
celery
-
1 can (16 oz)
chopped tomatoes
-
1 cup chopped
green pepper
-
1 cup chopped
onion
Preparation Directions:
Fry bacon and
crumble. Brown celery, green pepper and onion in some of the drippings.
Add rest of the ingredients and simmer 20 minutes.
