We are ardent devotees of traditional brine pickles here at Smugscum Terrace. I do not speak of those times one might accidentally hit someone in the head with a hammer, row them out to sea and allow the waves and minnows (sorry, baby fish... fresh or salt... I seem to have a vocabulary stuck in the C16th) to do their work. Be it the tangy strings of 'cooked' yet crisp cabbage, or nibbling the thickened warts from turgid gherkins, or slurping slimy jacks from our quivering fingertips, we have pretty much done it all, with everything, vegetable, animal, or mineral, consent or no...
Today we shall be making sauerkraut. Q: how do you make a kraut sour? A: ask them the price of reunification. See, times have moved on, and as all things following the bleak logic of the dialectic of the Frankfurt School tend to a circularity, drawing in their opposites, so it seems sauerkraut is once more on the table, as opposed to under the table, or in the dog, ~ actually I had this very night watched a distressing video of chinese dog fur-farming (quaint German pun, nein?). Poor skinned Fido lifted up his head, and wept tears of blood.
Sauerkraut. We are not speaking of the vile spunky slime interlarded with corpse-rotten hunks of soft, gelatinous 'meat' found in cans in certain French hypermarchés (although the wide throat of the tin-can has proved indispensible when a crafty in-the-tent-number-2 has had to be had (and another tin to catch the number 1 is simultaneously desirable) ah, pleasant memories of le Foret de Fontainbleau...); ~ no, we are talking of Real Sauerkraut: the lacto-bacterial fermented stuff, age-old as a preservation process, predating canning, bottling, freezing, etc. I hear Corpse-Cheese and Stinking Bishop are made the same way.
The technique is simple: chop your vegetables (not too large, not too small), apply a modicum of salt (about 3 tbsp per 5lbs of vegetables), pack tightly into jars, vats, barrels, etc, and wait for the airborne microbial infestational pestilential plagues to do their work (or if you are squeamish add the clear semenic whey that gathers on the top of all yoghurts, but ensure you use live semenic yoghurt, preferably not black-cherry or peach and vanilla). These naturally occurring lacto-bacteria (the very same that make that very yoghurt) will eat your vegetables, convert sugars to alcoholic esters and vinegars, free nutrients and vitamins that your own digestive processes could never manage to make available before the last trump of Christendom, and turn the raw and unappealing cabbagey material into traditional sour and real pickles. In other words, unbutton it, ram it down hard, expose to the elements and various ichors, and wait for the eruptions.
As Father Xmas came late this month in his lovely gallant pickling pot... Sorry, as Father Xmas came late this month with a lovely gallon pickling pot all the way from Germany, we set to Arbeit. First off was sourcing our vegetables. Naturally, we only go to the very finest of suppliers, so we headed for the 24 hour multi-cultural-continental-super-polski-turko-paki-indo-china-afro-ugraic-market. There we beheld cabbages we had forsooth forgot the very existence of upon this benighted god-forsaken earth. There were racks of sweet mild chillies, radishes of every shape, strength, dimension and girth to satisfy the most discerning brassicophile. Seriously, if you want Quality Produce, and Cheap, use your continental supermarkets, and fuck the ethics and pesticides, and food-miles - it's fresh, it's good, and what right have we got to complain in our pampered western overfed world about niceties like that?
We obtained enough vegetable matter to make 3 & 3/4 kg of raw material for the price (including spices (adjusted proportionately) and salt) of around £4.00. The supermarkets around here Oop Norf would of cost £7 or £8 for the same. I expect in the Cotswolds the price would be around £11.
Ingredients.
1 red cabbage
1 white Turkish cabbage
1 mouli
4 large mild green chillies
2 carrots
3 green apples
1 very large onion
1 bulb of garlic
1 large thumb of ginger
chili flakes to taste
cayenne to taste
red peppercorns to taste
cumin seed to taste
(3.75 kg of vegetables)
5 tbsp of salt
Method.
As described above - shred and chop and make little sticks and slices. Salt as you go. Ram it into the pot or jars. The juice should flow to the top if you crush down enough. If not top up with a little water. Keep it covered. If using a pot with an airlock, then your life is easy. If not, then skim any scum or moulds. The vegetables below should be fine in the brine.
Photos:
 |
| A Pleasant Tableau. |
 |
| Pommes Volant. |
 |
| Mr David Giving it a Good Pounding |
 |
| Goatse. |
 |
| Mooning. Inserting the Stones. |
 |
| Rimming the Seal. |
 |
| Napoleon Was Not Hungry. |
 |
| The Rotten Pot, Yoghurt Dip, and the Red Plague. |
[Posted by Justine, mostly written by me. Photos by her. St David's Day, 2013.]
