SC - period suerkraut?

[Philip & Susan Troy]

my lady Audrey says:

> I would like to hear more, when you do your research.  What we think is just
> common sense (a good housewife preserving her cabbage) is not always the
> case!  First of all, the brining process needs salt - which I don't believe
> was very available to all classes.  It was, at one time so precious, that the
> Romans gave their soldiers a "salt allowance" (hence the word "salary).
> The Polish also store shredded cabbage in barrels of salted water throughout
> the winter.
> Audrey (ann1106 at aol.com)

But on the other hand, we're talking of a cookery custom of the Germanic
people, whose territory in even early period contained useful things
like the Hallstadt/Hallein salt mines in Austria above Salzburg ('salt
city')-- and if memory serves, Poland has salt mines as well. The
Hallstadt mines in particular have been worked since the late Bronze
Age. So, an argument could be made that the prevalence of salt
preservation in a local cuisine is dependent on the availability of the
necessary ingredient-- which the Germanic people had/has in abundance. 
I would also suspect that the rich graveyards of the Hallstatt locale
that gave the name to this culture (I'm thinking of the lady from Grave
6, Hohmichele, who had extremely elaborately made clothing, including
silks that had been apparently laboriously unpicked from an imported
cloth and re-woven into wool and used as embroidery threads) were funded
by the wealth of trading that salt. The early culture now termed
Hallstatt spread most of Austria, Swistzerland, bits of eastern France,
southern Germany and into Hungary-- which suggests to me that not only
were these people sharing a common language, perhaps-- but a common
trading pattern for ideas (technology and words) and tangible items
(cloth, weaving techniques, salt, et cetera).

It is possible that the dish we know as sauerkraut is far older a
technique than we can document, as is the general technique of
salt/brine pickling. Without that documentation, though, a supposition
remains a supposition.

So, Master Adamantius-- think you the reason Rome ventured north into
the Teutonic/Germanic barbarian areas might possibly have been
acquisition of those mines?

ciorstan
(who is a textile geek and loves the Hallstatt twills...)
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