When fall turned to winter in my hometown, trucks with tons of cabbage would appear in our community. Cabbage was what we used to eat for the whole winter, because it was cheap (and we were poor), easy to cook and would keep for a very long time. My father would buy a dozen of cabbages and put them on the ground in our garden. No refrigerator was needed, cause the temperature outside was 20 degrees below zero for the most of the time.

So you can imagine: I like cabbages, cause we used to eat them a lot; I also hate cabbages, cause I used to eat them a lot. To fight against the tedium on the table, people invented sauerkraut, a kind of cabbage that has been fermented by various lactic acid bacteria. You could always buy it at the supermarket, but my father liked to make it by himself.

The whole process takes about a month, and success was never guaranteed. My father started to search for  stones to weight the cabbage each September when he went out for a walk after dinner. He found some along the river or in somebody else’s garden. He was really picky about the stone: it couldn’t be too large or too small and it was better to be flat.

To make sauerkraut, step one, put three or four cabbages into a crock and add salt in layers; step two, wait seven or eight hours and pour some water into the crock; step three, put stones on the cabbages and wait for one month. Every morning after that, first thing, my father would  go out and check the cabbages. Sometimes he was upset because they, stunk, which meant that he had used too much salt or the temperature was not ideal. Sometimes he cheered, and told us, ten more days and we would be able to eat sauerkraut.

The best way to cook sauerkraut is to boil it with pork belly. That’s our most famous dish. When I was in Beijing, I spent two years looking for great northeastern cuisine before I found Northeastern Bistro, which managed by a migrant couple from another northeastern province and their sauerkraut was very popular. I would bring all my friends there, calling a call a day ahead to reserve one pot.

Every time I visited that restaurant, I missed my father. And every September, he sent me a photo of the crock and told me that he had succeeded this year and he would cook when I was back.

My parents stand in front of cherry trees.

My father is a very traditional Chinese, and he believes that kids shouldn’t be too far away from their parents. He was against my decision to come to America, and asked me to promise to go back to China forever after I graduate. I went home in January for two weeks, and he bought me two bags of sauerkraut to bring back to New York with me.

I bought pork belly in Chinatown and started to cook myself. I tried several times and learned some lessons. You need to squeeze the sauerkraut really hard, or it tastes too sour. One day, when I finally made everything right, I sat down and had a bite of home, slowly.

Xinyu Jing