Why are pickled eggs sold at bars?

Pickled eggs tend to be a unique flavor experience. Typically, the process involves soaking hard-boiled eggs in vinegar, herbs, spices, and sometimes beets, resulting in a tangy, savory treat.

If you're craving just one pickled egg, rather than a whole jar, your best bet is a local dive bar. As noted in The Farmers Market Cookbook from 1982, "No respectable bar would ever be caught without a jar of pickled eggs on the counter."

While they're less common nowadays, you can still find purple pickled eggs floating in jars at numerous bars across the nation. But what made this peculiar snack a bar tradition? As told in Tales of the Cocktail, it all began with a savvy marketing tactic.

In the 1860s, bars in New Orleans began offering free lunches to attract customers, and these meals often included a hard-boiled egg. This practice might have been inspired by the French, but American bartenders had their own reasons for adopting it. For one, hard-boiled eggs can last for hours without refrigeration, and bars already stocked eggs for use in certain punches and cocktails. Another factor: "To make customers thirstier—and also to prevent them from drinking too much," writes Everett De Morier in The Invention of Everything.

De Morier explains that bars eventually switched to pickled eggs due to health concerns. Pickled eggs last even longer than hard-boiled ones, and they eliminated the need to deal with eggshells after the lunch rush. While pickled eggs are also popular in the UK, where the World Pickled Egg Championship is held, it's the Germans who are credited with introducing the snack to the U.S.

"The eggs were a favorite of Hessian mercenaries, who passed the tradition on to the Pennsylvania Dutch. They used a simple method to make them: The egg—or cucumber or beet—was placed in a jar of spiced vinegar and left there," writes De Morier.

At the same time New Orleans bars began offering free lunches, pickled eggs started to appear in German saloons across the U.S. and gradually spread to other bars. Culinary historian Richard Foss suggests the snack's popularity also had to do with taste: Pickled foods complement certain lagers perfectly. "The influx of Germans changed America's beer culture," Foss tells Tales of the Cocktail. "I suspect they introduced a preference for pickled items that pair well with lager."

It's still a well-loved bar snack in certain parts of Germany, he notes. Once Americans developed a liking for pickled foods, the tradition stuck around for many years. Before Prohibition was enacted, it was quite common to see a jar of pickled eggs sitting alongside a jar of pickled pigs' feet on the bar.

At some point during the evolution of the hard-boiled egg, deviled eggs and Scotch eggs also became popular bar snacks, according to Punch. Today, many pubs serve more enticing options like soft pretzels with cheese or fried jalapeño poppers, but if you're lucky, you might still come across the humble pickled egg on your next night out.

"Never been to a bar with a jar of pickled eggs? Then you've never truly lived," Duane Swierczynski writes in The Big Book O' Beer. "There's something unforgettable about those who've eaten a pickled egg from a jar with a layer of dust to rival the Tomb of Tutankhamun."