[Sca-cooks] Period Pickled/fermented vegetables

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Sep 17, 2005, at 9:54 AM, Pat wrote:

> I'd say that most period pickling involves fermentation.  I know  
> the compost recipe from Curye  allows vegetable fermentation.

I'm not too sure about that, although there's no instruction to store  
it in an airtight container, so I suppose it's possible. It's true  
the vegetables in compost are, for the most part, cooked and then  
salted, but they're also supposed to be draining off some of their  
moisture (which is true of sauerkraut, dill pickles, and kim chee,  
also, but all of those involve salting the ingredients in a container  
so a brine will form). They're drained on a cloth and then stored in  
a wine-vinegar-mustard-honey marinade. To me, this is a lot more like  
sweet bread-and-butter pickles than like Kosher dills. In other  
words, you're preserving in an acid you've added yourself, rather  
than creating an environment where lactobacilli are encouraged to  
make that acid for you, which is more the case with sauerkraut.

>   Almost any vegetal matter with enough sugar will ferment  
> spontaneously given time, water, and the right temperature range.   
> Yeast is a very successful species.  It's not so much getting food  
> to ferment that's the problem  It's keeping other invasive molds  
> out, and getting the fermentation to stop before the yeast eats all  
> the food.
> Given that there was a shortage of refrigerators in our period of  
> interest, I think it was kinda inventive of our ancestors to come  
> up with a way of preserving that didn't require them.

I am a little surprised that there doesn't seem to be more  
documentable evidence for the existence of fermented pickles in  
places like England and France in our period. Maybe wine vinegar in  
comparative abundance rendered such processes unnecessary, or perhaps  
there's a relationship between a relatively inexpensive local salt  
supply (as in, IIRC, Poland?) and the prominence of sour-brine  
pickling in some places?

> What is your definition of "pickling"?

Well, I'm not Stefan, but since I've shoved my oar in this far, I'd  
say pickling is preserving in an acid liquid, be it a soured brine,  
sour whey, vinegar, alegar, lemon juice, etc. What these all have in  
common is their pH.

Adamantius


>
>
> Stefan li Rous <StefanliRous at austin.rr.com> wrote:
> We've been specifically talking about fermented cabbage (sauerkraut).
> Are there any period references to other fermented vegetables such as
> they mention on this website? Perhaps some of what have been
> discussed as period pickled vegetables references are actually
> fermented ones?
>
> Stefan
>
>
> Lady Anne du Bosc
> known as Mordonna the Cook
> Shire of Thorngill, Meridies
> Mundanely, Pat Griffin of Millbrook, AL
>
>
>
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