These Crispy Pork Fritters Are So Well-known, My Household’s Restaurant Makes 200k of Them a 12 months

Rising up in Ohio, I figured sauerkraut balls came visiting from Germany, or perhaps Jap Europe. Reality is, they’re most likely from Cleveland.

I’ve heard loads about these crunchy little pork-and-kraut fritters through the years: They’re the preferred appetizer at The Golden Lamb Inn, a lodge and restaurant in Lebanon, Ohio, that my household has owned since 1926. The kitchen rolled about 200,000 of them in 2024.

The Golden Lamb occurs to be the oldest constantly working restaurant in Ohio, however our sauerkraut ball recipe solely dates to the Sixties, when an accountant named Edith, visiting from Cleveland, shared a model with longtime chef Norm Sims. That’s all I knew about its historical past for years. After doing a little analysis, I’d guess a number of orders that Edith acquired her recipe from the supply, or someplace near it: a white-tablecloth restaurant in her hometown referred to as Gruber’s.

Trying by a long time of newspaper articles, I didn’t discover any point out of sauerkraut balls as we all know them (versus meatballs cooked with sauerkraut, which have been round for a very long time) till the late Forties. That’s when diners and meals writers started being attentive to the signature appetizer at Gruber’s—created as a tasty and economical method to make use of up meat scraps, per varied accounts.

In 1949, the nationally syndicated columnist Erich Brandeis wrote about attempting “a scrumptious concoction corresponding to neither my spouse nor I had ever seen or tasted earlier than” at a celebration. He went on: “The hostess gave my spouse the recipe—you’re taking some sauerkraut and put it by the grinder along with boiled ham. You combine this with some thick white sauce, type it into little balls, and roll them in bread crumbs. Then you definately deep-fry them till they flip good and brown and serve, first sticking a toothpick in every ball.” I don’t know the place Brandeis, who lived in Connecticut, had his first sauerkraut ball, however that feels a lot just like the Gruber’s recipe that ran in papers nationwide within the years after World Conflict II. So does the recipe we use on the Golden Lamb.

Within the a long time since, the town of Akron, about forty-five minutes from Cleveland, has formally adopted the sauerkraut ball. Readers on the Akron Beacon-Journal voted it the town’s official meals in 1996. For those who search “sauerkraut balls” on Newspapers.com, you’ll see that that paper has run about twice as many articles concerning the heartland croquettes—1,278, on the time of publication—as another within the nation. Judy Orr James’s 2022 cookbook “Akron Household Recipes” concludes with a complete chapter on sauerkraut balls, subtitled “It’s An Akron Factor.” 

However even James acknowledges that Cleveland did it first, noting that the Beacon-Journal didn’t point out sauerkraut balls for the primary time till November 1952, after Gruber’s had already impressed the well-known meals writers Clementine Paddleford and Duncan Hines with theirs.

And whereas the sauerkraut ball has advanced through the years, together with on the household restaurant, which now has its personal secret recipe, the Gruber’s model was a nationwide phenomenon for a motive. I went by dozens of reference recipes when researching this dish, and although I experimented with newer additions and substitutions together with cream cheese (quite common), breakfast sausage (widespread), and pork shoulder (much less widespread), none improved on the unique system. So, I cleaned it up for a contemporary viewers, making solely comparatively minor modifications to enhance the feel and taste. The foundational recipe is all about stability—between pork chops and ham, hearty meats and zingy sauerkraut, a young middle and a crisp, crumb-coated crust. This recipe maintains that.

There are comparable dishes in Europe, together with Dutch bitterballen, wealthy with beef and gravy, and Spain’s well-known croquetas de jamón. Sauerkraut balls observe a well-known system—sautéed meats and aromatics sure with a roux, formed, breaded, and fried. And the mixture of pork and sauerkraut is widespread in European cookery, after all, particularly in Germany and Jap Europe, the place many northern Ohio households hint their roots. Within the melting pot that’s the Midwest, these imported concepts got here collectively to type an ideal little appetizer, bar snack, and celebration chunk. Drawing on European custom however nearly definitely native to the Buckeye State, these sauerkraut balls stability the flavors and strategies of the Previous World with the playfulness and ingenuity of the New.

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