“You Have to Cook It In Your Own House”: One Family’s Pork and Sauerkraut Ritual
“this is a German custom. But I, bafflingly, spent most of my life thinking it was Irish. After all, my mother, the parent who insisted on this tradition, is surnamed Walsh; nearly her whole side of the family is Irish.”
by Mary Berman
My family has a New Year’s tradition so strict, it transcends the bounds of custom and enters into the realm of rule: On New Year’s Day, we cook and eat pork and sauerkraut.
We’re not alone in this. A New Year’s pork and sauerkraut meal is common among the people of Pennsylvania. It originated with the Pennsylvania Dutch, who harvested cabbage in the fall and pickled it to preserve it, and then did their winter butchering before Christmas. The Pennsylvania Dutch also say that pork is good luck because pigs “root forward,” as opposed to chickens, which “scratch back”; and that eating sauerkraut on New Year’s Day means you’re in for a “sweet year,” even though literally no one has ever described sauerkraut as sweet. Sauerkraut means money, too, because cabbage is green… although, of course, sauerkraut itself is not green.
The point is, this is a German custom – which stands to reason, since one of the components of the meal is “sauerkraut.” But I, bafflingly, spent most of my life thinking it was Irish. After all, my mother, the parent who insisted on this tradition, is surnamed Walsh; nearly her whole side of the family is Irish; as a child, she visited her cousins in Ireland every summer; the legend of Mary Ann O’Meara, my great-grandmother who threw up her hands and said “I’LL do it” when her older sister chickened out and refused to get on the boat, is practically mythological; and all the other superstitions I grew up with – keeping your shoes off the table, entering and exiting via the same door, throwing salt over your left shoulder after you’ve spilled it (and only after the first time I did this did my mother remark, dryly, that it’s also best to throw the salt into the sink) – are Irish. Why should this one be any different?
“It’s really a German tradition,” my mother explains, when I ask. “I had a German grandmother, Elizabeth Volb, who was born in Germany” – I had always known this, but somehow the information was always drowned out in my mind by the Irish-ness of it all – “and an Irish grandmother who was born in Ireland.” This was the aforementioned Mary Ann O’Meara. “And they both engaged in this tradition, although I don’t know the genesis for the Irish side.” (Incidentally, per food historian William Woys Weaver, the idea that pork brings good luck is actually rooted, ha ha, in ancient notions of Lugh, an Irish deity symbolized by the pig. So the tradition is Irish, in a way!)
At any rate, my mother’s whole family – cousins, second cousins, aunts – has always participated in the tradition for as long as she can remember. Mary Ann O’Meara, she thinks, used cabbage instead of sauerkraut, and cheap fatty pork butt instead of center-cut pork roast; but my mother’s father preferred the pork roast that Elizabeth Volb had always made. So when my mother’s mother married him, she started making that, too. And that’s what my mother ate on New Year’s, growing up. And that’s what she made for the first two decades of my life.
The type of pork and sauerkraut don’t actually matter, though. Pennsylvanians agree on this. Some people use canned sauerkraut, some fresh. Some ferment their own. My own mother, and her mother, always went for fresh kraut over canned, with a strong preference for Kissling’s brand.
As for pork, some people use pork butt or roast, like my ancestors. Some use tenderloin. Some use pork shoulder. In my family, we’ve used all of them, plus Italian porchettas and Polish kielbasy – just another example of the way this tradition crosses and transcends cultures, for us and for everyone we know who’s lived in this area a long time. My mother’s Scottish friends, for example, have always partaken in the custom, because they have a German great-grandmother somewhere up the line. My mother’s sister’s family are Italian, but her husband’s grandmother was Pennsylvania Dutch, and they’ve always done it, too. My father, who’s ethnically Jewish, married my mother, and now he does it. No matter what, if you live near southeast Pennsylvania, the tradition seems to seep in over time.
But here’s the key part of my family’s version, which I haven’t been able to find a record of anywhere else: You have to cook the meal in your own house.
In other words, if you’re going to celebrate the holiday at someone else’s house, even if they’re cooking pork and sauerkraut, you still have to cook the same meal on the same day.
Which means sometimes you have to cheat.
Picture this: I’m five years old. We’re going to my aunt’s house for New Year’s dinner. We’ll be having pork and sauerkraut, like everyone else within a hundred-mile radius.
It’s eleven o’clock in the morning, and my mother is hastily frying bacon in a pan, and opening up a can of sauerkraut, and forcing me to eat a strip of bacon and a strand of sauerkraut before we go.
I don’t know why the Walsh-Berman family has this extra rule, and I say so to my mother: “I looked it up. There are a lot of places where people pick up the cooked pork and sauerkraut from their local church or something.”
“I can’t speak to that,” my mother says stoutly. “All I know is we have to cook it in our own house.” Her conviction is unshakeable. “And,” she adds, proving her point, “there were a few years when my sister didn’t cook it herself, and in those years, she felt they had bad luck.”
“Did you ever not do it?”
“Probably,” she admits. “But I don’t remember not doing it since I had you.”
Neither do I.
But things were different this year.
Oh, don’t worry – my mother made pork and sauerkraut, same as ever. (This year she did kielbasy.) The difference was that this year, I too felt compelled to cook the meal. I’ve always counted my mother’s house as my “ancestral home,” and visited on New Year’s Day, and checked the obligation off. But now I own a home. I live with my partner. A new household has sprung forth from the old one; and frankly, after hearing about the years when my aunt had bad luck, I didn’t want to risk it.
So, like my mother and her husband before me, my Irish-Catholic self and my Russian-descended partner fried a strip of bacon and opened a can of sauerkraut on New Year’s Day, just as our German ancestors did.
By Mary Bernam
Sources cited:
Kovach, Emily. “Pennsylvania’s Favorite Food for New Year’s Day.” PA Eats. Accessed January 2, 2023. https://www.paeats.org/feature/pennsylvania-saurkraut-pork-new-years/ .
Negley, Erin. “Why Pennsylvania Dutch Country Eats Pork and Sauerkraut on New Year’s Day.” LancasterOnline, December 28, 2021. https://lancasteronline.com/features/food/why-pennsylvania-dutch-country-eats-pork-and-sauerkraut-on-new-years-day/article_12fce704-0aba-11e9-b6af-c3c19c9882d9.html .
Orso, Anna. “Pork and Sauerkraut on New Year’s Day: Why the PA Dutch Believe It’s Your Luckiest Meal of the Year.” Billy Penn, December 31, 2015. https://billypenn.com/2015/12/31/pork-and-sauerkraut-on-new-years-day-why-the-pa-dutch-believe-its-your-luckiest-meal-of-the-year/ .
