Massage the cabbage
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 181
FOOD FRIDAY DEP'T.
FOOD FRIDAY: Somehow It's Time to Make Sauerkraut
THE WHOLE CONCEPT of "fall harvest season" seems like a bluff, if not a fakeout. It's dark out at dinnertime and there's less and less to cook. More than half the "Top-Rated Vegetables" on the grocery-delivery site right now are somewhere on the spectrum between purely decorative gourds and butternut squash. The produce industry newsletter I subscribe to says the back-to-back hurricanes "devastated tomato crops grown in North Carolina and Tennessee" and then "hit the Ruskin, FL tomato-growing region hard."
This is the season for just figuring out how to get something on the table, not for branching out into kitchen projects. But in my desperation ordering the groceries last time around, I bought a head of purple cabbage. So now I'm making some purple sauerkraut.
I did this once before, and it mostly worked, but I made a whole quart jar of it, and I don't eat sauerkraut that much. The remaining portion drifted further and further back in the fridge until it hit the weird sub-freezing air current all the way in the rear and it developed ice crystals and the part without ice on it dried out.
The sauerkraut recipe isn't really for purple cabbage, but purple cabbage is what I had the last time I tried it, and when I have green cabbage, I just cook it one of the various ways I know how to cook green cabbage. The recipe comes from the very beginning of an attractive and wildly ambitious cookbook called Wildcrafted Fermentation: Exploring, Transforming, and Preserving the Wild Flavors of Your Local Terroir: Wild krauts and kimchis, fermented forest brews, seawater brines, plant-based cheeses, and more by Pascal Baudar. The sauerkraut is there to just sort of get the reader settled into the basic process of fermenting something, before they start using chickweed and nettles and oak bark. Maybe someday when my fortunes have taken a strong turn for either the better or the worse I will be out in the woods somewhere with a local terroir, with plenty of roots and weeds to choose from, but for now I browse the grocery delivery options, and making the sauerkraut is not mere proof of concept for the adventure but the adventure itself.
I bought a pack of two wide-mouthed pint Ball jars off Amazon, since all I had to work with in the apartment were quarts or half pints, and I got the book off the shelf and followed the instructions. I cut a wedge out of the cabbage a bit smaller than a quarter of it, sliced it thinly, decided it looked like it wasn't enough, and cut and sliced another chunk. The cutting board was pretty full of cabbage; if I had too much for a little pint jar, I decided, I could just figure out a way to use it for dinner.
The book said to use two teaspoons of salt per pound of cabbage, or—with excess precision on the conversion—11 grams of salt for 454 grams of cabbage. I had 243 grams of cabbage, so I weighed out 6 grams of sea salt and then let it just tip over to 7, in case I lost some salt along the way. I dumped the salt in the bowl of shredded cabbage and started mixing it by hand to massage it.
In hardly any time at all, the cabbage was soft and slippery and in a state of collapse. I was not going to have any leftovers. I thought about cutting more cabbage and measuring out more salt, but I was trying to avoid putting too much effort into the project.
I let the cabbage rest, came back and massaged it some more, and then dumped it into a jar with all the purple liquid that had come out of it. I probably could have fit it in a half pint after all. Some of the cabbage was sticking up above the brine at first, but after I mashed it down, it stayed submerged. The book recommended covering it with a cabbage leaf and weighing that down with a "pasteurized stone." The rock I boiled for the job last time is around the kitchen somewhere, but I figured I could wait till later in the day track it down and boil it again. Meanwhile I stuck the jar in a bowl and stuck the bowl in the corner of the counter. Ten days from now the contents will either be sauerkraut or they won't.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, October 17, 2024
★★★ The temperature had not come up yet, but the crispness in the air had softened. Inside the downtown train it was stuffy enough for shrugging off the hoodie. Down at the bottom of Central Park, the sun and the shade seemed to belong to different days and places altogether; passing from dazzling gold to underwater green made the nose begin to run. A woman on a park bench held up a hand to shade her eyes to see the standing person she was talking to. Even as a cold wind bore down, though, the insides of the elbows kept sweating in their thick sleeves. An hour or so later, a thin layer of clouds had appeared, their grain twisting this way and that. A flight of pigeons clattered up and went whistling by at head level across the corner of the Park. The chill had conclusively gotten the upper hand; the hoodie that had been the wrong choice for the outbound trip was the right one for the return.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast.
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE WOULD LIKE to present instructions in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from 'Please, M'm, The Butcher!': A Complete Guide To Catering For The Housewife Of Moderate Means, With Menus Of All Meals For A Year, Numerous Recipes, And Fifty-Two Additional Menus Of Dinners Without Meat, by Beatrice Guarracino, published in 1903, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all; however, availability-wise, the latest communication from the Internet Archive reports:
Internet Archive Services Update: 2024-10-17
Posted on October 18, 2024 by Brewster Kahle
[Washington Post piece]
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security.
The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
Indignity depends upon the Internet Archive for the Premium Sandwich Content you never asked for, but urges you to support their mission.
MARKETING DEP'T.
We are down to the last 18 copies of the second printing of 19 Folktales, still available for gift-giving and personal perusal! The nights are getting chilly and longer, but the stories are each concise enough to read before your bedtime tea cools off.
A Word from FLAMING HYDRA: The SWAG Fundraiser and ARCHIVE PROJECT
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Many of the Flaming Hydras once wrote and/or edited at The Awl and The Hairpin, and we want these sites to have the posterity they deserve. So we’re getting started on the work of online scholarship. With your help, and the advice and help of the editors of The Awl and The Hairpin, we’re designing an online literary refuge for a handpicked selection of the best work these sites produced, presented with care in a well-designed archival setting, with captioning, commentary, essays, and comment sections available for Hydra subscribers. If we reach our GOAL, we’ll design and develop a living sanctuary for these important landmarks in the history of web publishing (so they don’t wind up in some gross AI chum farm where they steal bylines and wreck everything!!!)
SPECIAL BONUS KICKSTARTER EXCLUSIVE: THE AWL BOOK
This collection of top-shelf pieces from The Awl, edited by Carrie Frye and published and produced by Flaming Hydra in consultation with The Awl’s original editors and contributors, will also include ALL NEW commentary and original essays from contributors and readers.
