Thursday, March 5, 2015

From the Hearth: Cultural Eating!

When we as Heathens gather together, it can be under a variety of contexts. It may be a blót, a sumbel, a study session, a kindred/hearth birthday or anniversary, or any reason that gives us an excuse. Each of these events can be drastically different from one kindred to another depending on the customs of that group. Despite all this variety of experience, there is one underlying universal principle. We all like to come together around good food!

Food is one of the most defining and stable elements of a given culture that can outlast the loss of language and other traditions. While a given dish might have started out because it what was available and needed, given a specific geographic and historic location, it becomes an immersive experience and way to reconnect to our heritage. Enjoying lefse with Thanksgiving dinner at my Norwegian grandmother's apartment and krumkake at Christmas with my other grandmother in Iowa are cherished memories.

Since the goal of this space is for me to put out my thoughts about how bring heathendom into modern life, one way to do this is to incorporate more dishes with Scandinavian and Germanic origins into our diet that will create more such memories. This also dovetails nicely into my own healthy eating goals that take their inspiration from such people as Michael Pollan, Sandar Katz and the Slow Food Movement which is all about bringing back the enriching experience of eating Real Food and embracing the process involved.

Our first experiment has been to naturally ferment sauerkraut. The doing is more of a method than a recipe:

Start with a head or two of cabbage, pickling salt, very large mixing bowl and a large non-reactive container; in this case we used a convenient one gallon sized jar.

Clean it out real good if needed, find a plate or something can be used to keep the cabbage below the brine and if needed something to weight it down (a pint jar filled with water works well). If you don't have a plate or disc, then just reserve a couple whole cabbage leaves.

Once this is all assembled, then you shred the cabbage and toss it into a large bowl in layers with salt sprinkled onto it. Next is the fun part - the shredded cabbage needs to be bruised a bit, squeeze and kneed it with your hands, use a mallet, whatever works. The goal is to have the salt extract the water in the cabbage and make a tasty salt brine which will favor the lacto bacteria which creates the souring lactic acid as a byproduct.

Fill your container, packing the cabbage down tightly. Place your weighted disc or tuck those whole leaves you saved on the top. You want to keep all the shreds under the brine. If you don't get enough water from the cabbage after the first 24 hours has passed, then you can add some brine of just salt and water to it - you only need to make sure the cabbage stays covered. It will release some gasses as it ferments, so either cover the top with cheese-cloth or better yet use a fermentation water lock.

That’s really all there is to it. Let stand 2-6wks at room temp and then either transfer to root cellar or fridge to slow down the ferment or can it to stop it all together. One of the historically important things about sauerkraut is that the fermentation process release bio-accessible vitamin C from the cabbage and gave our ancestors a crucial source of this nutrient through the winter when other sources were scarce.

Enjoy!









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