Why sauerkraut didn’t became zoyerkraut
Experience eclipses fantasy
I was hoping to tell you about my new love for sauerkraut; to be able to wax lyrical on its ability to make me feel connected to my ancestral roots. But I'd have been lying.
If I was going to start cooking Ashkenazi food regularly, I’d thought, I’ll need something zoyer; some acid to cut through all the schmaltz.
Once again, the story begins with a Heinrich Heine poem, meaning it’s probably time to tell you a little something about him. Heine’s father, Samson, was a textile merchant and his mother Betty the daughter of a physician. Karl Marx was his third cousin, once removed. Heine was born a Jew in Dusseldorf in 1797 and converted to Lutheranism in 1825. Harry became Heinrich. In the opening section of his magnum opus, Germany, A Winter’s Tale, he wrote of departure from Paris
Just think, I miss the smell of peat! It pains me to live without The dear sheep of Lüneburg’s heath, Turnip dishes and sauerkraut.
Later in Section IX, his ode to fermented cabbage continued
The table was readied, it was Good old German cooking all right. Hail to thee, dear sauerkraut! Your smell is a real delight!
He also dreamed of stuffed chestnuts in green cabbage, black bread, a mixture of well baked eggs and herring, and swine heads. In all of this lived the feeling of a sacred homeland, a longing for home. A Jew, at home, in Germany!
On reading the Ashkenazi section of Claudia Roden’s encyclopedic Book of Jewish Food, the frequency of sauerkraut surprised me. We didn’t eat it at home, and I’d always thought of it as something German. In fact, my first memories of sauerkraut are of eating it with bratwurst at Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park, a rare occasion when Londoners encounter German food, and some of my earlier encounters with treyf. Years later, I came to associate sauerkraut with the Reuben sandwiches I ate regularly – with immense joy and pride – at Medici, a restaurant two blocks down from my home at the University of Chicago, where I studied in 2012.
I bought the cabbage the day before. As I looked at the cabbages in the fridge — each one quite evenly sized, about as big as a water polo ball — I thought about the odd shapes that must have emerged from the ground before my ancestors began preserving them. I thought about the magical, kabbalistic ways they may have thought of them. This one felt a little plain.
The next morning, I took the cabbage out of the fridge and placed it next to the glass Kilner jar. I weighed the cabbage, and then weighed 2% of its weight in Maldon sea salt. 777g of cabbage, 15.54g salt.
I peeled off its harsher outer leaves. I tasted it. A mild bitterness came first, followed by a juicy sweetness emerging on the back of the tongue. I finely sliced the cabbage into wavey filaments with my Japanese steel, and then massaged the slices in the salt, before stuffing it all into the jar, ensuring it was submerged under its own brine, which had released quickly.
A week passed, as the lacto-fermentation turned lactose and sugars into lactic acid – into something that will last for months.
So what did I do with my jar of sauerkraut?
Well, it’s more a case of what I didn’t do. The plan that never actualised. I didn’t get round to trying the Claudia Roden recipe for Choucroute Garnie à l'Alsacienne (boiled meats and braised sauerkraut), and there was just one time when I used it in a way that could recognisably be called Ashkenazi – in a salad of sauerkraut, grated carrot, and dill, with a sour cream dressing, topping one of my leftover latkes, reheated in the oven, and sitting underneath a poached egg.
In the end, most of the sauerkraut ended up being consumed during a lunch I usually have once a week; a tin of sardines on sourdough toast with some kind of salad. I mixed it with harissa paste, fresh parsley, capers, mint leaves, and lemon juice, and placed it on the toast before the sardines. It was the best rendition of sardines on toast I’m yet to come up with, so I repeated it, weekly, until the jar was finished.
On finishing the jar, I was left with a question. Should I be disappointed that I most commonly sought to mask its dear sour taste with the more amiable flavours that have come to dominate my pantry? Does this indicate the inescapable failure facing me on this mission to integrate a core of Yiddishkeit into my kitchen?
Maybe I was drawn to a harissa-sauerkraut because I was actually longing for something closer to kimchi. Yes, if I’m going to strengthen my gut microbiome, I’d rather do it with something with punch and real flavour! In any case, sauerkraut came to Germany from the Silk Road, probably originating with suancai in China, so if you go back far enough, it was undoubtedly a more interesting product.
Or perhaps it’s just too radical to try and alter my quotidian dietary practices. I’m sure I’ll make sauerkraut again, and even try the Roden recipe, but truthfully, I can’t imagine it generating the same feelings I had on cooking tshlunt for the first time. This could be because sauerkraut is already so visible in the UK’s food culture. So ordinary. I may need ritual or ceremony to bask in the spirit of ancestry.
What I learnt is that nostalgic fantasy cannot always replace the density of my own experience. I keep coming back to this, but if diaspora Jews have learnt one thing from our history, it’s that culture is inherently evolving. Change was constantly thrust upon us, meaning we continually had to make things anew. In modern Britain, we’re in the privileged position of being able to adapt our traditions with the service of an enormous pantry. My Ashkenazi kitchen will inevitably be hybrid.