The Daily Brine / Local history / Kraut Country
Local History
Kraut Country
It's late October here in Cortland County and the Finger Lakes Region. The cabbage harvest is in full swing. The cool mornings smell like wet leaves and the ground is frosted with ice crystals. The barrels in the cave at the ferment kitchen are full of what will be next spring's kraut. This is the time of year we think most about the people who grew cabbage in this valley long before we showed up with our shredder.
The first acre
In 1885, a Preble farmer named Perry Haynes brought home cabbage seed and planted a single acre. By the Town of Preble's own account, it was the first acre of cabbage in all of Cortland County. It didn't stay lonely for long. Within a generation, Preble had become the largest cabbage-growing area in Central New York.
That says something about the ground here (we get into the glaciers in another post), and it says something about the people farming it.
Cows first, cabbage second
Preble was dairy country before it was anything else, and the town still describes itself as famous for its rich soil and its dairy farms. A Preble farmer named Millard Nye brought the first Holstein cows into Cortland County. Local producers organized a milk cooperative in 1940 that still serves area farms, and milk went out in cans right up until 1969.
Dairy is steady work with a demanding boss. Cows need milking twice a day, every day, whether or not the milk price cooperates. So plenty of dairy families planted cabbage on the side. It fit around the milking: plant in spring, cut in fall, and sell the heads for a check that didn't depend on the milk truck. A barn full of Holsteins and a back field full of cabbage was a common Preble picture.
Carly grew up on her family's dairy farm in Truxton, just a few hills over from the Preble Valley, so this part of the story is close to home.
Three factories and a lot of wagons
All that cabbage needed somewhere to go. At one time, three sauerkraut factories worked this region, turning valley cabbage into kraut by the vat-load.
Kraut-making was big business across Upstate New York. Out in the Finger Lakes, the village of Phelps called itself the Sauerkraut Capital of the World, and its plants ran from the early 1900s until 1985. Farmers hauled heads in by horse and wagon, loading two at a time on long-handled pitchforks, some heads weighing fifteen pounds or more. Inside, the cabbage was trimmed, cored, shredded, salted by hand, and packed into cypress vats that held thousands of pounds at a time.
New York is still one of the top cabbage-growing states in the country. Most of the factories are gone, though. The century-old kraut plant in Shortsville closed in 2018 when its owner moved production to Wisconsin.
Picking up the thread
To be honest, we have always been kind of old-school. From our love of old-fashioned fonts to the preservation techniques of yesteryear. When we started making kraut and kimchi in quart jars in a Philadelphia apartment, we were thinking of our ancestors and the traditions they crafted over generations, even bringing them overseas and keeping them alive on their family's kitchen table.
When we came home to Central New York to be near family and farms, it was a welcome thing to be back in the heart of kraut country. Becoming part of this region's story was a huge part of our inspiration; reviving the old tradition of kraut-making was near and dear to our hearts. We wanted to find the connection between what we were doing in our ferment kitchen today and the stories Carly's grandpa, Ernie Young, used to tell about planting cabbage as a boy and the kraut factories that dotted the region in decades past.
Nobody grows commercial cabbage in the Preble Valley anymore, so today the green cabbage for our sauerkraut comes from a fourth-generation family farm in the Finger Lakes Region. We know the family, we know the fields, and we know the heads arrive dense and fresh from harvest, which is exactly what a long raw ferment wants. From there it sits in our barrels for four to six months before we pack it into jars by hand.
Perry Haynes probably never pictured his first acre turning into a jar of kraut on a kitchen counter in Ohio. We like to think he'd approve. He might ask for caraway.
If you'd like to taste the valley, our Classic Kraut is the place to start.
~Dave & Carly & the F&F Crew
