I wonder if I could make that using grapes? I have a lot of red cabbage and the grapes are just now ripening on the vines. Maybe I could throw them in the dehydrator?
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I bet. And you’d really only need to half-dry them, maybe not even at all, since the recipe has you reconstitute the currants in warm balsamic…
I was thinking chopped apples would go really well, too, and add another pop of color. Seems like a really good base recipe to play around with, and something I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. Love those.
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That’s my go-to winter red cabbage dish - slow cooked with a diced Granny Smith and then some balsamic vinegar, brown sugar and butter to finish. Great with pork.
But that recipe looks like a step up - that’s going on my list!
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FWIW, my advice is:
- slow cook all of the flavors together right from the start;
- red wine vinegar rather than balsamic, to give a bit more bite (sweet & sour) to the dish.
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I like to caramelize some onions, sauté a bit of carrot and give the apples a head start. Some color on this stuff helps give it some complexity.
Then braise it all together. Cider vinegar though. Usually toss a couple whole garlic cloves, 3 or 4 bay leaves, some pepper corns, caraway seeds and a couple of juniper berries in too.
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I follow a recipe that was already an old family recipe when my grandfather (born 1895) started making it. Danish rather than German in style, so no onions or apples or carrots, and a very different flavor mixture in the herbs etc. 3 hours of low simmer/braising though, which sounds very similar to yours.
All three of the styles listed here so far sound excellent in their own way.
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Yeah i’ve cobbled together a bunch of old german recipes and basically tweaked as I like.
What I’ve found is making sure to brown at least the onions helps keep it from getting one dimensionally sweet. Fills it out a bit.
If I don’t have time to do that I tend to leave them and the carrots out.
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Red wine vinegar is less sweet than either cider vinegar or balsamic vinegar. Maybe try that next time to see if it helps your sweet-to-sour ratio.
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Oh tried, like the cider vinegar better. Both onions and carrots bring sugar to the table. Especially carrots. Browning them brings complexity, but on their own it can be just sort of flat. So I just skip them if I don’t have the time.
It’s also why I like brown sugar over white, brings flavor not just sweetness. And using onions carrots and apples for sweetness means less sugar dumped in.
Cooking them down is active cook time, rather than passive bubbling on the stove time. So dropping them out to simplify prep is useful if you don’t want to stand at the stove for a while.
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I’ve been progressively emptying the freezer and discovered a small tub of pistou. So tonight is soupe au pistou, and TBH this burst of summer flavour was what I desperately needed today. We’re in lockdown 6(a) and I’m just about done. This, though, is sublime.
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I’m quite sure about it: no thank you!
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I say yes, I would try it (if someone else made it, for sure, though I probably wouldn’t bother to make it myself). Though it looks to me like there’s too much sugar in it.
It brings to mind mincemeat pie, which I love, and which was originally made with meat. (Recipe for traditional mincemeat, e.g… I haven’t tried making it myself.) Some store-bought mincemeat pie filling today still does contain some beef suet.
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I think that’s where I’ve landed. Seems like a poor use of pork sausage, when there are so many other delicious things to make with it.
But I do enjoy looking at these weird, retro recipes.
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Agreed! I was thinking it was probably from the days of many more family farms, when people may have had a surfeit of pork on hand, to use up in any way they could get their family to eat it.
I couldn’t help but notice the line “Onto piece of wax paper, sift flour, ginger, baking powder, and pumpkin pie spice.” My favorite recipe for gingerbread [which btw was the very first thing I ever cooked/baked all by myself for my family, probably around age 8 or 9 
You never forget your first, as they say, though about something else, I think 
. I still use the recipe.] came from a cookbook probably from the 1930s or 40s (I’m guessing) and says to sift the dry ingredients onto a piece of wax paper. A quick look online tells me that, while waxed paper had been used by butchers, the Cut-Rite brand was created and began to be sold for home use starting in 1927. It intrigues me how recipes were/are written in order to push certain products. I certainly don’t waste wax paper by stirring my dry ingredients together on a piece of it. I’m still working on the single roll of wax paper that I bought, as far as I can recall, when I moved into this place 26 years ago! I only use it, if necessary, for packing cookies to give away, or between slices of pizza to go in the freezer.
Interesting article about food wraps in The Baltimore Sun, May 11, 1997 (I only skimmed it, though)
Wrap it up we’ll take it
Protection: For centuries there wasn’t much more than paper available to wrap foods, but the advent of Cut-Rite Wax Paper and aluminum foil changed the market, and the kitchen, forever.What a dark time it was in the American kitchen: 1926, a year before the dawn of the Age of Convenient Wrapping.
There was butcher paper, a waxed paper available in sheets from the meat market, but little else was available to protect food from spoiling in a sea of air and ambient smells. No Baggies. No Saran Wrap, Ziplocs, Reynolds Oven Bags or Hefty OneZips. No Reynolds Wrap. Not even Cut-Rite Wax Paper in the box with the serrated metal cutting edge – wax paper as handy as water from a kitchen sink.
Of course, now some of us are trying to get away from using such disposable, one-time-use products…
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Interesting about the food wrap! I still use tinfoil, though generally I use it multiple times before discarding, but I’ve cut way, way down on plastic wrap since I got some of those beeswax/cloth wraps. Those and good storage containers make the plastic wrap obsolete. It’s funny to see some of those things go full circle, where we go back to what the “convenience product” was designed to replace.
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Yes—my grandmother, in the 1950s/60s/70s, was still using those glass containers with the glass lids, for refrigerator storage, that were from earlier in the century. You could find them in all the vintage stores in the 1980s/90s, because no one wanted to use them anymore at that point. Now, they’re being manufactured again.
I love that you call it “tin foil”—I do still, sometimes, too! (I also still say “icebox” sometimes, too.) It depends on who I’m talking to—around my siblings, it just pops out naturally. I always figured it’s because our parents were older than usual when they had us, and they had grown up in the 1920s and 30s, and that’s what they always said, so we kids said it too, although what we actually had was aluminum foil and a refrigerator. But I wonder if it’s a Northeast thing? (I don’t know where you actually grew up, though…I grew up in Western New York.)
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Just donated a set of matching glass storage boxes for the fridge because they are very heavy and breakable. I hadn’t used them for years. I do reuse ziplock bags over and over, until they either get holes or the sides split.
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Might be! I grew up in Maine.
Another funny local term is “hamburg” instead of hamburger. It’s in grocery store flyers and everything.
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Can highly recommend the ikea (sure there are 100 other companies making them too) silicon stretchy things, perfect for closing a bowl, or half a cucumber…
washable, very reusable.
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