“You should have a Schürze,” my mom tells me.
Schürze is German for apron.
(Schürze, not “Schirtze,” as I had it in my Notes app. Thanks, ChatGPT.)
It’s a Saturday in late June, and I have cajoled my mom into coming over to teach me how to make the sauerkraut that has been a staple of Christmas dinners with our family. It’s served with Weisswurst: “A traditional Bavarian sausage from southern Germany,” according to ChatGPT, “made primarily from finely minced veal and pork back fat, fresh parsley, lemon zest, mace, onion, ginger and cardamom.” (Fact check from mom: It’s Silesian, not Bavarian, although it does contain veal.)
As instructed in advance, I have pulled allspice, bay leaves and whole black peppers out of the pantry and picked up bacon and an onion from the grocery store. My mom has brought a can of German Sauerkraut with white wine.
I ask my mom where to find cans of sauerkraut. She says it depends. You can get it at the supermarket. She got it at a specialty store. (Her answer sounds like it could have come from ChatGPT.)
She tells me her eldest sister preferred the cans to the jars because they’re packed with so much sauerkraut. (There’s a family nugget that AI couldn’t generate.) That’s the same sister who would insist that the sausages be browned on all four sides, which would have my mom at the stovetop in a Schürze on Christmas Eve, no matter who was hosting.
My mom has also brought her family cookbook, titled, “guten appetit eat eat eat.” She tells me her middle sister sat with my Oma (grandmother) to record recipes including “MOM’S SAUERKRAUT” and gave everyone a copy one Christmas. Which year exactly, my mom can’t say for sure, but the pixelated graphic of a steaming turkey on the cover and the typewritten quality of the font used for the recipes offer some clues.
We start by washing the sauerkraut “lightly.” What exactly does that mean? At my mom’s direction, I reserve the excess liquid in the can “in case you need to add some later to adjust for flavour” and rinse half its contents.
My mom didn’t start making sauerkraut until it was her turn to host Christmas Eve dinners. That would have been after I was born, because everyone would travel from different parts of Ontario to the household with the youngest kids.
The sauerkraut goes into my bright orange hand-me-down Dutch oven on the stovetop. When I move to submerge the sauerkraut in water, my mom intervenes when I do it the hard way: holding the pot in the sink instead of placing it on the counter and swivelling the tap.
Next come the allspice, bay leaf, peppercorns and onion. It’s important to dice the onion finely if I want to recreate an authentic version of “MOM’S SAUERKRAUT.” (But also, my mom doesn’t particularly like onions. Apparently, this helps.) She reluctantly demonstrates and lets me take a few photos before turning the chef’s knife and cutting board back to me. Miraculously, neither of us sheds a tear.
We have an hour after bringing the pot to a simmer. Except I didn’t prepare the bacon in advance, which mom thought I would have done. (She also thinks I paid too much for the bacon.) But that gives us some time to talk.
It’s unclear where the sauerkraut recipe, or any other of the recipes, would have originated from. My Oma apprenticed as a cook. It could have been her recipe. It could have been a recipe passed on to her.
I heat a stainless-steel pan over the gas-fired stovetop and start the first batch of bacon. Sizzle. Splatter. This is when a Schürze would have helped. (Okay, you were right, Mom.) This is also when my dog and would-be sous-chef comes by to check on our progress and to sample some of the bacon. We save some of the bacon fat for later.
At last, it’s time to drain the sauerkraut. I empty it into a large turquoise serving bowl and we taste it. Turns out, it does need some of the reserved liquid from the can — it’s too mild. After that, I drizzle in some bacon fat, break the crisp bacon strips into bits and mix them into the sauerkraut.
It’s not a particularly complicated recipe. I could have easily looked up how to make sauerkraut on ChatGPT. (When I asked for a recipe that would complement Weisswurst, it suggested some familiar steps along with some unique ingredients, including apple, juniper berries and mustard. I also can’t help but notice it recommended bagged or refrigerated sauerkraut over canned.)
But it wouldn’t have tasted the same, it wouldn’t have evoked warm family memories formed around food, and it wouldn’t have meant a Saturday afternoon spent with mom.
I pack up some of the sauerkraut for my mom in a glass Tupperware container to take home. (My dad later texted to let me know he liked it.)
This Christmas, I’m bringing the sauerkraut.
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