Sauerkraut on New Year's Day

​Champagne toasts. Caviar and blini. Chinese takeout. All laudable New Year’s rituals. But if you’re smart, you’ll already be stocking up at the meat counter for the most important tradition of all: eating pork and sauerkraut for good luck on New Year’s Day.
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I remember being dragged to Christmas parties as a child, hiding under fold-out buffet tables pushed against wood-paneled walls and laden with steaming Crock Pots. I’d breathe in the briny, slightly acrid perfume of the bubbling kraut and pork fat, watching the grownups’ feet as they shuffled back for another helping. My parents remember their parents feeding it to them every year for luck and likely the great-grandparents were cooking up vats of the stuff when they arrived in the States too. 

Though I grew up assuming that this was just another weird western PA food quirk, it appears that this tradition is something we Pittsburghers can’t claim as our own.The good luck meal is a staple across the great state of PA, and in Ohio, West Virginia, or anywhere with a historically prominent Eastern European or German (which is what the Pennsylvania Dutch are, remember? Dutch=Deutsch) immigrant population.

The formerly green cabbage of the sauerkraut and the abundant fat of the pig symbolize riches and prosperity for the coming year, the pig doing double duty to stand for progress as a forward-rooting and forward-thinking animal (its four hooves all point toward the front). Slavic superstition also dictates that you should eat the long, skinny threads of sauerkraut to give you a long life—smart thinking when you consider the probiotics and other wonderfully healthy byproducts of the fermented cabbage. Sooo eat up for good luck, or just because it tastes good!