Is it possible to transfer the cabbage to a food grade plastic 3 or 5 gallon pail? If so, do it. One week in the crock is not very long. If there is anything unfirmiliar under the sealed brine bag, just skim it off. It is difficult to mess up kraut.

I quit using all the old family crocks many years ago. You can never tell about old crocks and their glazes. The brine solution is acidic and may leach lead into the kraut.

In your case, some sort of salt(s) is leaching out of the crock itself.

When I added that risk to the the weight of crocks and the difficulty of cleaning, especially if there's mold, not to mention the mess of seepage I switched to food-grade plastics and glass.

Generally Extension agencies caution against using old crocks, primarily due to the risk of lead.

Carol

Up until about 40-50 years ago, LEAD was used in maming the glazes. It was just these years ago, that lead poisonin was becoming very common. I even lived in an old house that had lead water pipes coming into the house from the street. AFter the owner passed away (I found her dead), I had asked teh heirs to have the water line replaced as the city tried to correct the issue outside, but managed to make the leaking water migrate into the next door neighbors basement. Needless to say, any crock that many years old, woudl most assuradly contain something thats not healthy. Salt and lead don't just 'may' leech, but will DEFINATELY leech lead. Take a look at car batteries. They go dead due to the dead breaking down inside, and falling to the bottom, which shorts out the cells. I would not even attempt to move the kraut to a food safe plastic, unless it was only in the crock for less than 2-3 HOURS tops. You have lead poison there now. Out of curiosity, you could collect a small sample of the brine juices, from the BOTTOM of the crock and send it out to a lab to see what the PPM is for a lead reading. Today, there are still millions of old houses that have lead pipes, or at least lead in some locations within their water supply. Even for that, lead based solders were still used to make copper pipes connect to fittings.

It WILL leach lead IF lead is present. Not all old crocks fall into that category, which is why I used the word MAY.

Regardless, the point is that we have no way of knowing for sure and it's better not to take the risk.

Carol

Thank you all for your comments. I decided not to risk the health of my family and discarded the fermenting cabbage. I will of course clean the stoneware crock and keep it as a family heirloom.

Sharon

I think that you can buy a cheap lead test kit in most hardware stores. It would just require a small chip or sample from the crocks glaze to test. From what I read, about 85% of the stone crocks made beyond 50n years ago were glazed with lead based coatings.