A different version of this essay appears in Festive Maryland Recipes: Holiday Traditions from the Old Line State.
Sauerkraut came to Baltimore with German (and later, Eastern European) immigrants, but it made the leap to the dinner tables of Baltimore’s other citizens, in particular alongside the Thanksgiving turkey.
Much has been written about this peculiar phenomenon, with a new flurry of articles and social media posts coming out each year.
In an Instagram post made by the catering company H3irloom Food Group, Chef Tonya Thomas posed proudly with a plate. “Thank you to all of our customers who ordered Chef Tonya’s sauerkraut to add to their holiday spread,” read the caption.
“No matter who you are and what your race, in Baltimore, sauerkraut is on the table at holidays,” Thomas told me. She can trace the sauerkraut tradition in her family back for generations, to well before the 20th century. When Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, Germans were the largest group of immigrants in Baltimore, she noted.
In many places where sauerkraut is eaten, it is stewed with meat cuts or sausages for extra flavor. This was a good fit for Black home cooks’ practice of using every part of an animal, and Tonya’s grandmother cooked hers with pigtails. Tonya eventually began to flavor her own sauerkraut with smoked turkey instead of pork. More recently, she has flavored the sauerkraut with vegetable stock and spices instead of meat, to accommodate H3irloom’s vegan guests.
The formula for sauerkraut itself is so simple that only a handful of recipes appear in my Maryland cookbook collection. It’s also long been available for sale in prepared form.
In Elizabeth Ellicott Lea’s 1845 cookbook “Domestic Cookery,” the two recipes for sauerkraut are labeled as “cabbage,” suggesting that sauerkraut may have been the primary use for cabbage in her household.
The earliest Maryland recipe calling the dish by name is in the 1870 “Queen of the Kitchen,” by Mary Lloyd Tyson. Had Tyson wanted to, she could have purchased prepared sauerkraut at William Bodmann’s Pickling House and Vinegar Depot on Howard Street.
Continue reading “Kapusta And Kilbash (and Sauerkraut for Thanksgiving)”
