Well, phoo. Wikipedia on sauerkraut. It's just old Lactobacillus, the same genus as is in yogurt. So it's another example of bacterial foods (and fermentation being used to produce a food item).
The article gives some interesting information about the distribution of the food; I wonder if the Manchurian version and the European version have separate origins (what would be called convergent evolution or analogy in evoloutionary biology) or if somehow the way of making sauerkraut came originally from China, perhaps through Marco Polo.
There is also a variant, called sauerruben, that's made out of turnips or rutabagas. Now that's something I'd like to try!
1 comment:
There's a sci-fi book my husband's read that he mentions every once in awhile--aliens come to earth and are trying to get along with us. The one thing they can't get past is how much of our food has cultures in it--"you eat milk so spoiled it's solid, and heat infected dough! Gross!" So they blow us up, or something.
I always thought that was an interesting take on food taboos.
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