Well, autumn has come, is it time to ferment cabbage?
I am now reading a book by Ekaterina Avdeeva with a long and complex title: The Complete Cookbook of an Experienced Russian Housewife or a Guide to Reducing Household Costs.
The book is wonderful, and the recipes are very interesting, and the fact that thanks to economic layouts you can imagine the life of a wealthy city or local (that is, living on an estate) family of the nineteenth century. I beg you to note that I put the definition of the wealthy in the first place, for the peasant farms the book has nothing to do, so to extend the entire experience of Avdeeva to all social strata of society in Russia is not worth it.
However, I think there are recipes that were used by everyone - from peasant women (the word women is not used in a derogatory context, and as an established expression, even Nekrasov did not disdain him) to housekeepers and housekeepers in less aristocratic families.
One of these recipes is sauerkraut recipe. I have always believed that they were harvesting cabbage in one, simple and well-known way - they chopped cabbage and carrots, rubbed them with salt and tamped them.
But no.
Avdeeva, among others, gives the following recipe:
- Wash the chopped cabbage on a sieve so that the glass is water.
- When the water drains, place the cabbage in a tub in rows, sprinkling each row with a small handful of salt and cumin.
- Each row must be crushed with a crush so that the juice appears, and in order to increase the juice, each row of cabbage must be poured with a glass of very salty water. After that, the row is shifted with slices of carrots, apples or cranberries.
To be honest, the presence of water in the cabbage recipe made me a little... strained. In my opinion, the fermentation process will go a little differently, perhaps it will be more intense. Perhaps that is why she warns that the cabbage must be pierced twice daily, and the smell will be very strong, unpleasant. Yes, cabbage does not smell like roses during pickling, but I have never come across a really very strong unpleasant smell.
And here's the nuance: without water, we cover the cabbage with leaves as soon as we tamped it, and here - only two weeks later.
If you decide to try this method, then 1 garnet of salt water is taken per barrel of 15 buckets of cabbage. Garnets is a quarter of a bucket of water salted with a pound of salt. And cumin - well, you need a lot, from 4.5 to 6 glasses. I suspect to fight off the smell.
Another mystical sign: if you like crunchy cabbage, you need to harvest it for the new moon, and if soft, then for the last quarter of the moon. Although, in my opinion, in order to get crunchy cabbage, it is better not to harvest it according to recipes that allow bacteria to roam at full power - like this.
Have you tried it, by the way? Well, about the moon, what do you say?