THE KRAUT BARREL                                  Tentative  AUG 7^th   

My Grandmother made sour kraut!  This was always puzzlement when I was a young child.

Until I began my genealogy work, if I gave it any thought at all, I always assumed that our family was completely of English origin.  After all, with names like HAYWOOD, HOUSE, YANDLE, PARKER, and ARANT, what else could it be?  Ah, the utter ignorance of the uninformed!

As I’ve written before, my family did not sit around on the front porch and tell their history over and over like the folks in ROOTS until everyone knew WHO they were and WHERE they had come from.  My people were not storytellers.  All I had to work with was my (PARKER) mother’s  “they said we were Scots-Irish,” and my (HAYWOOD) dad’s “they said we came from the west!”  I more-or-less considered the Scots and the Irish as generally English.  (I know – I know – I apologize!  As I said above – the uninformed.)  And really you can’t get a more southern country English sounding name than Arant!

But as a child I was aware of something different.   All southern ladies canned things.  Good things out of their vegetable gardens.  All my aunts made pickles and piccalilli and chow chow.  I can see my Grand aunts Virge and Sallie on a Sunday afternoon at my Grandmother Blanche’s house on Mint Street in Charlotte all sharing their different offerings for that year.  Each one would have made the product by their own recipe and it would be slightly different from the others.  So they would share with each other.  The dinner table was never set without a dish of piccalilli or chow chow on it.  It was as necessary as the salt and pepper.  It was always selected to go with the meat in that meal.  Chicken would need one taste,  beef roast another.  And ham would require a different one, maybe one with some mustard in it.  Piccalilli was made mostly of green and red bell peppers with onions and seasonings, and chow chow was mostly cabbage and onions and seasonings, all chopped very fine and pickled.  This was ordinary and normal.

What was different was that MY GRAND- MOTHER MADE SOUR KRAUT!  Southern ladies did not usually make sour kraut!  It was very good kraut.  Not like the kraut you buy in the supermarket today.  It was not too sour, it had just a touch of sugar, and there were hot pepper flakes in it, giving it a faint tinge of pink.  I was vaguely aware of all this as a young child, but since I had nothing else to relate it to, I just filed it away as a rare strange thing, and let it ride.

Then entered my adventure into GENEALOGY!   A whole new universe opened to me.  I ventured  out of that “ignorant uninformed” state into a world of wonderful knowledge.  I learned marvelous  things!   I learned that along with my English HAYWOODs and NELSONs and YANDLEs, there were the Scots-Irish PARKERs,  the Scots ALEXANDERs, the Irish Mc CAINs,  the Welsh WALTERs, and the Germans.  Oh my, the Germans!  Before this time I had NO earthly idea that we had any German ancestry!  And I doubt anyone else in my extended family knew it.  Well except maybe the WENTZs, who had kept the knowledge of their history.

There were the HOUSESs who turned out to be German (Haus).

There were the afore mentioned WENTZs, who always knew they were German, I just didn’t know the WENTZs!  (This was my GGGrandmother Catherine whom I have written previously about finding.)  And then there were the ARANTs.  When Johann Hermann left Germany with his family, they were the ARNDTs.  But due to the practice of spelling names like they sounded, when the ARNDTs landed in Philadelphia, you can just imagine them standing before the man stating their name with their German accent  “Ar-rndt”  with a strong accent on the “dt.”  And the man sat there and wrote “ARRANT!”  For two generations they used ARNDT.  Then it became ARRANT, and sometime after 1800 our line dropped one of the “r”s and it was ever after ARANT.  These were my “English” southern country ARANTs!  No, actually they were my German ARNDTs from Nordhausen, Rhineland-Phalz.  They had floated on a raft down the Rhine River to Rotterdam, got on a boat, and on 28 AUG 1733 arrived in Philadelphia on the ship Hope.  They traveled down the Great Wagon Road to Salisbury, and then on to Chesterfield, SC by 1771.

My ARNDTs and my WENTZSs, both German, both of the same generation, were finally settled in the Charlotte area before the Revolutionary War.  They lived near each other, and it is possible they could have known each other.  They would have led similar lives.  I imagine their households would have been similar, with the same tools and equipment.  Their kitchens were more-than-likely identical.  Their daily lives probably would have been very much alike.

And this brings me, finally, back to the kraut barrel.  When I came into possession of a copy of the will of Johann Andreas WENTZ who died in Mecklenburg Co, NC, in 1807,  there it was…important enough to be listed in the will… important enough to be legally passed down

…the kraut barrel!

I am sure there was also one in the ARNDT household.  And then I knew why my Grandmother made sour kraut.  She probably didn’t know why. . . why this tradition was in her family. . . what the back story was.  It had been done all her life, and was for her just the normal thing to do.

But now I know why my Grandmother made sour kraut.

. . . Experience your history . . .

Make your own Sour Kraut

I plan to make some kraut this fall, but I have to wait a little longer until it is cooler here where I live.  I make big dill pickles each year in this manner.  I set the big jars in the bathtub of my guest bath (luckily no guest at the time,) to ferment.  Then they go in the fridge and will last up to a year!   There are easy ways to make kraut, also using large Mason jars instead of a crock or barrel.  Put this in your search box:   make_kraut_in_glass_jars.  You will get loads of ideas.   The ones made with red cabbage look gorgeous!   Be sure and put the "underline spaces" between each word so you won't get ads for selling glass jars.  Learned that neat trick in the the webinar I told you about in my blog: "My Dad Bill."   The Ancestry webinar was named  “Google Search Strategies for Common Surnames.”  which was not about Surnames at all but search tricks instead.  Find it here:  http://www.familytreewebinars.com/watch-video-free.php?webinar_id=174

I found  a good kraut site with pictures at :

http://heartlandrenaissance.com/2012/11/lacto-fermented-sauerkraut-in-10-simple-steps/    (It works best to copy the address and paste it onto the search box.)  It looks very interesting.

Let me know how your venture into history turns out, and I will do the same.

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