Depending on the type of bars you’re going to, you may have seen a jar of pickled eggs on top of a counter. These hard-boiled eggs are soaked in vinegar with herbs and spices and are a staple of old-school bars. But why pickled eggs of all things? According to Tales of the Cocktail, it was a marketing ploy at the beginning.
New Orleans bars introduced a new policy in the 1860s – free lunches. They wanted to make their customers thirstier, so they would order more drinks but also prevent them from getting too drunk by drinking on an empty stomach.
Eggs were a convenient choice, so they rolled with it. Over time, bars switched from plain hard-boiled eggs to pickled ones, because they could keep them longer, and they were neatly stored in a jar with shells already removed.
Around the same time, German saloons in the US started serving pickled eggs with beer, helping make both more popular around the States.
