Reply #8: Past date probably isn't a big deal. My grandmother described

[struggle4progress]

to me once how they home-made sauerkraut when she was a peasant girl. It went roughly like this: get a big barrel, shred lots of cabbage, layer handfuls of salt alternately with cabbage, put a round wooden top into the barrel on top of the stuff, weight it down with stones, and then wait weeks until it looks and smells done. They didn't have refrigeration or any modern preservatives, and I expect the process wouldn't work if everything was too clean: the vinegar is produced by exhaustive fermentation, so some natural yeast contamination was required. It's a very old low-tech recipe for saving your cabbage in a barrel so you can eat it until the next harvest season: the cabbage shreds are cured and preserved in a salty vinegar that prevents growth of mould and bacteria

I once stuck some leftover Christmas turkey and sauerkraut into my fridge: the stuff got pushed to the back, and I rediscovered it the following August or September. I thought, Well, shit, what a waste! but I opened the container and sniffed anyway. There was a nice odor of turkey mingled with sauerkraut. I dumped it into a saucepan and poked it around, looking for mould or odd discolorations: there was none. So I bubbled it gently on the stove for maybe have an hour and ate it: it was perfect -- not a thing wrong with it. Sauerkraut is a great preservative