Pickles are one of those everyday foods with a great back story that often gets buried in all that salty brine. Cleopatra reportedly attributed her beauty to a steady diet of pickles (a $150 pickle facial is sure to hit Beverly Hills spa menus any day now), and Aristotle touted the health benefit of preserved veggies – as in sauerkraut juice cleans out the craggy pipes (Venice health food stores are sure to follow with the powdered protein-shake equivalent).

The local pickle trail recently led me to the small, family-run Kruegermann factory just north of downtown Los Angeles, where a few months ago I learned the fine art of cabbage stomping for this Wednesday’s LA Times report. Who knew making naturally fermented sauerkraut required a precise “stomping ratio”? Let’s just say I can stomp with the best of them after spending a little time learning from chief Kruegermann stomper and UC Davis Science & Technology graduate Carl Kruegermann.

The photo on the right is 77-year-old Grandad Kurt moving 1,500 pounds of cabbage; he founded the company in L.A. in 1965 when his pickle factory in East Germany was taken over by the communist government. Earlier this week, I spoke to Carl’s older brother, Greg. who has got to be the biggest genuine grinner I’ve met in the ten-plus years of living in Los Angeles (having been raised in Fort Worth, Texas, a city of 24-7 smilers, I felt right at home). Greg is also the practical-minded end of the pickling package, a Cal State business major with a minor in frischgurken, those lightly sweetened German-style “fresh pack” pickles (not really, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could all minor in vegetables? One step towards solving the obesity crisis, perhaps?).

I also had the pleasure of enjoying a fantastic lunch prepared by Grandmom Helga, the first grass-roots American pickler of the family. She hand-jarred the first pickles in their Glassell Park home shortly after she and Kurt first moved to L.A.

If Helga (that’s Helga and son Carl, at left) ever invites you to lunch, re-arrange your schedule. On my visit it was an amazing spread of German beer sausages and deli meats from local meat markets (European Deluxe Sausage Kitchen among them), and way too many dinner-worthy cheeses for a quick factory lunch — and that was before we got to the pickles. Helga’s version of homemade quark cheese spread on Bavarian bread and made with cottage cheese and sour cream drizzled with linseed oil (over here we call it toasted flaxseed oil), was excellent. But keep your lip zipped on the linseed oil— the one they serve is a fantastically full-bodied version imported from Germany (don’t get the Kruegermanns started on the quality of American linseed oil).

Before the family hits the height of cucumber pickling season in a few weeks, their busiest time of the year, they’re all headed on their annual pre-pickling vacation. This year, it’s a sailing trip around Catalina Island. Greg is renting a boat big enough for the whole family and is still hoping this June gloom “breaks and get summer-like hot.”

Not quite what you expect to hear from folks used to working in a hotter-than-a-pickled-jalapeño factory near downtown Los Angeles.

“Oh, Hamlet, how camest thou in such a pickle?”  — William Shakespeare

— Jenn Garbee

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