Many years ago, before the Internet, I decided to make sauerkraut. My local greengrocer had gifted me with 2 HUGE cabbages and I was at a loss as to what to do with them. I lived in France at the time, and no one seemed to be able to help me with a working recipe, though there was a lot of "ma mère a dit..." and "la recette de ma grandmère..."
I remembered my grandmother telling me stories of her mother making barrels of sauerkraut when she was little and, based on vague recollections of the ingredients and methods she had described, I cobbled together a recipe. I used way too much salt and, though we kept those jars of cabbage on a shelf in the garage for months and I checked on them often, they never released any liquid, never showed any signs of fermentation but remained crunchy and crisply preserved until I broke down and ceremoniously tossed them the day after my husband died.
This time I did tons research and used an actual recipe with measured ingredients (gasp!) so - in about 10 days - we shall see. So far, having been hand massaged for 10 minutes before packed into the largest glass container I could find, it is doing what I am told it should do and I am daring to dream of a proper Choucroute Garnie towards the end of next week.
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