Who doesn’t love meatballs? They’re easy to eat, fun to make and come in endless variation. Hell, there have been whole restaurants and cookbooks dedicated to the humble meatball. These are German meatballs.
Königsberger klopse is a classic German dish that uses several ingredients I don’t normally associate with German food: capers, anchovies and lemon zest. I found the recipe in Mimi Sheraton’s classic, The German Cookbook: A Complete Guide to Mastering Authentic German Cooking, which is to German food what Joy of Cooking is to traditional American food.
Apparently this is a very common recipe in Germany. East Prussia, to be exact, where Königsberg once stood. The city was leveled in World War II. Afterwards, when the Russians took East Prussia, they renamed the city Kaliningrad.
Historically, these meatballs are made from veal or pork. I first made them with wild pork, then with ground bear, sent to me by my father, whose friend in upstate New York wanted to see what I could do with bear meat. Both were good.
That said, I’d stick to pork, or even pork mixed with ground turkey or chicken, or of course veal — if you can find humanely raised veal.
I initially used bread soaked in milk and torn to pieces, as the original recipe does. But I didn’t care for the texture, so I now use breadcrumbs instead. Much better.
Pronounced something like ker-nigs-burger klop-seh, these German meatballs are a little unusual. For starters, they are not browned. You cook them in broth, very gently, and then use that broth to make a roux-thickened sauce studded with capers. Sour cream and parsley is mixed in at the end.
Capers and anchovies, Mediterranean ingredients, do appear here and there in German cuisine. After all, Germany isn’t that far from Italy, and trade has been going on there since Antiquity.
German Meatballs, Königsberger Klopse
Ingredients
MEATBALLS
- 1 cup minced onion
- 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 1/2 pounds ground boar, veal or pork
- 2/3 cup breadcrumbs
- 2 teaspoons anchovy paste or 5 anchovies, mashed
- 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
- Zest of a lemon
- 1 tablespoon chopped parsley
- 1/2 teaspoon white or black pepper
- 2 eggs
SAUCE
- 1 quart duck, beef or veggie broth
- 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 1/2 cup minced onion
- 3 tablespoons flour
- 2 tablespoons capers
- 2 tablespoons parsley
- 2-4 tablespoons sour cream
- Salt and black pepper to taste
Instructions
- Heat the 2 tablespoons butter in a small frying pan and cook the cup of onions over medium heat until they are soft. Do not brown them. Sprinkle a little salt over the onions as they cook. When they are translucent and soft, remove from the pan and set aside to cool.
- Once the onions are cool, mix all the meatball ingredients together in a bowl. Form into small meatballs with a teaspoon. You can make them bigger, but a heaping teaspoon makes a nice size.
- Heat the broth in pot large enough to fit all your meatballs. A wide, deep saute pan with a lid is a good choice. Once the broth is simmering, turn the heat down to as low as it will go and add the meatballs carefully. If they're not all submerged in the broth it will be OK. Cover the pot and let the meatballs cook gently for 25 minutes. Carefully remove them and set them aside.
- Pour out the broth and save it. Wipe the pan with a paper towel and set it back on the heat. Add the 3 tablespoons butter and turn the heat to medium-high. Cook the onions until they're translucent. Don't brown them. Add the flour and mix well. Cook this over medium heat, stirring often, until everything is the color or coffee-with-cream. Add the hot broth a little at a time, stirring constantly. Keep adding it until you have a sauce the consistency of thin gravy -- not as thick as Thanksgiving gravy, not thin like soup. You probably will not need the whole quart.
- Return the meatballs to the sauce and add the capers. Heat through on low heat, then add the parsley.
- Serve with the sour cream at the table. Have people mix it in when they eat. This will prevent the cream from curdling and will let people make the dish as creamy as they want. Grind black pepper over everything and eat!
As soon as I read klopse, it was a word of food from our Baltic culture. Prussia and the Prussian language are directly related to us Latvians and Lithuanians. This is delicious way to prepare our food, not German. History lost as the language and peoples went through genocide.
I am German. My mom always had a jar of capers in the fridge.
I was stationed in Jacksonville Fl. When
My husband was in the Navy one of our friends made meatballs like these with the gravy and combined them with Sauerkraut. It was fabulous! Have never been able to find a recipe .like it. I could have sworn it was called Feldeskraut, or something similar. Anyone ever heard of it or Seen a similar recipe?
I love this recipe I’ve made a few adjustments because I use it for my restaurant and when it’s a 10x batch you can chill on the strong ingredients like lemon zest and anchovy (I also use house made pork broth). Thank you so much for putting this out there.
Oh my goodness Hank! I am sure I broke some religious rules of cooking but I made this tonight. I did end up with ground boar from the market. And combined it with local beef and lamb. And I added the red wine and the blueberry plum jelly into the sauce and it was ridiculously yummy! Made a fennel, butternut squash and green tomato gratin for the side.
I made this tonight with ground venison, no fat added. I was VERY HAPPY with the results. Simmering in broth kept these lean meatballs moist and I love the subtle flavor of these meatballs without the guilt of a lot of heavy ingredients. I would echo the comment above, for my taste, a slight bit more acid would do – though I think next time I’ll just serve lemon wedge with it and use a gentle squeeze on top after serving.
Great recipe, it’s going in my personal cookbook after just one dinner, though that’s not entirely uncommon with recipes from this site, lol.
Thanks Hank!!!
This is similar to my German Mennonite grandmother’s recipe for Saur Klops. Her recipe called for a flour roux and vinegar stirred into the broth just prior to serving. The vinegar bite with the creamy sour cream and potatoes added at the table was and is considered comfort food among the cousins.
I have a bunch of cougar left. Would I be correct in thinking this might be a perfect recipe to try?
PJ: Yes, this will work. I’d grind the meat with bacon or other pork fat though, so it’s not too dry. And be sure to cook it through – as you probably know, cougar meat is very often infected with the invisible parasite larva that causes trichinosis; they die when the meat is well cooked.
Would it work with ground venison?
Sam: Absolutely!
Original they would uses Matjes (Herring) but in the last Century Anchovies
was easier.
Tried this recipe from “Duck, duck, goose” today with ground goose(from wings and legs) and it was an easy, yet delicious meal. We all lay snoring for two hours after. I think your suggestion about using dry breadcrumbs did a lot of difference.
Also, in reply to all of the comments about capers, anchovies, lemons – there is a large contingent of Italians living in Germany. My husband is from Baden-Wurtemberg and a few of his friends come from Italian families – probably the alliance between Mussolini and Hitler made it a more common modern phenomenon, probably the Austro-Hungarian empire had lots to do with it too, probably just the history of Europe, period. The Romans got around, for example. Food is such a fascinating cross section of history, really.
Hank
I know this is an old post, hope you will still get this question. I have a pretty serious fish alergy and I would like to make your wild boar meatballs but I can’t use anchovies. Can you recomend anything that I could substitute that would serve the same purpose in this dish? thanks for your help.
Mike: Well… Can you eat Worcestershire sauce? It will work, but it does contain anchovies. My advice if you can’t, is to just skip it.
As a new hunter without an inheritance of game recipes, I love your site (and book). My daughter made this tonight after my son and I each got a wild pig last week and it turned out great. Thanks!
My mother makes Koenigsberger Klopse because she is from Berlin. They are my favorite birthday dish. I’d add a couple of ingredients to your list — add lemon juice and whole allspice to the broth. Also, add the capers into the broth, not just at the end. They will stand up to the cooking process just fine. In my experience, two kinds of ground meat are better than one (veal and beef, or veal, beef, and pork). Oh, and that bread in milk thing — German Broetchen are hard rolls, so what you do is soak a stale one in milk and then squeeze out the milk as much as possible. We eat these Klopse with Salzkartoffeln (cook potatoes like you would for mashing, but then don’t mash them). The potatoes are great for soaking up the sauce. Obviously there are as many variations to this recipe as there are for meatloaf, an American classic.
And don’t get me started on that English concoction in a bottle (which I dearly love on eggs) that is made from ingredients sourced in India (tamarind, clove) by an industrial process in a global trade economy. Certainly that little oddity has not been in Prussian meatballs prior to the obvious requirement of England colonizing India and the average worker being able to afford a bottled sauce, etc etc.
Recipes are so fascinating if you ask this questions as Hank was doing.
Yes, Martin, ease up a bit. And you could use a dose of historical perspective as well. After all, citrus is really an Asian ingredient, so depending on how far back you want to go you might ask how an ingredient like lemon made it into the recipe. Any recipe is a snapshot of a point in history and it includes references to foreign trade, climate, the state of agriculture at the time, refrigeration (or lack of it), etc etc. The tomato is widely considered an Italian ingredient, and yet it’s really from the Americas. The Swiss didn’t invent chocolate, it’s from Mexico. Irish potatoes? They are Incan, of course. I realize much of this is common knowledge… or, is it?
To say that these ingredients are all very commonplace German ingredients is only true for a current German recipe. But for an older recipe, there is quite a lot to this question “How did it get here?” Certainly there were not men on horseback from the beginning of German history rushing lemons from the south into Germany because house fraus demanded it for their klopse!
Nice. We can actually get ground wild boar meat at the grocery stores here in Sweden. I’ll have to give this a try. I’m always interested in ways to use the wild meats we have such easy access to here.
Reliz: I try to never shoot a boar heavier than 200 pounds. Over that and the meat gets iffy. And yes, they’d be fine with spaetzle. And thanks for the insight on the possible origin of these Mediterranean foods in German cooking!
Martin: Uh, stupid? I am pretty sure I know as much about typical German cooking as a German knows about real American cooking, which is to say not much. All it is is simple ignorance, which we are all guilty of from time to time. And make no mistake: Ignorance is not stupidity. So cut me some slack.
It is funny how much such stupid and false cliches seem to remain forever. How on earth can you think that such things like capers, lemon zest and anchovis can not be a part of German cuisine. I blame this thinking on a bit of American shortsightedness. German cuisine is NOT sausages and sauerkraut. Infact, the majority of German recipes uses imported southern stuff like spices, lemons. Capers for instance are widely used, such are peppers and other stuff. Really, this recipe here is nothing special, nothing fancy – this is just good old grandma cuisine.
One of my first beaus was from that neck of the woods in Germany and made these for me… I thought they were fabulous… thanks so much for the recipe!
Fantastic photo as usual, Hank. Makes me hungry and inspired to locate an area where feral swine are a problem!
Also, if you look at the location of Königsberg, you see that its not far from the Baltic sea, which probably explains the addition of the fishy paste, plus pickled/salted fish adds an extra salty-sour layer to an already delicious dish. Although I’ve been informed by my hubby that the fish never makes it to my mother in law’s version. Probably she has eaten it before it made it there. 😉
Ö = oe
Actually, capers aren’t too far off the mark when you think about typical german flavors. Mustard, sauerkraut, sourdough, pickles, etc. Although you tend to see capers more with white meats like fish and chicken, which is probably how it ended up in this dish. My husband is east german and we’re living here in Potsdam and his mother makes this dish. I hate capers, but I pick them out because I actually love this dish. Maybe try pickled or salted herring in place of anchovies for a more authentic flavor as that is more common here. My mother in law eats pickled herring right from the can. (*blech*)
And, if I may add… The Kingdom of Italy was allied with Prussia in its war against Austria. In fact, this is how Italy (re)gained Venice. I would not be at all surprised if that’s how the anchovies made it into the meatballs!
This would be even better with spaetzle. I’m going on a boar hunt in Monterey County in March. If it all works out I’ll test the recipe with Spaetzle and report back. BTW, I think smaller boar would be best even for meatballs. Would you agree? Or do you think it depends more on which cuts you use?
Adalyn: In theory, yes, but it kinda defeats the idea of this meatball, which is to create a “white” dish. Even the bear meat I used was pretty light in color, like good pork. I honestly think it would be better with ground chicken or turkey than lamb.
So, would ground lamb work ok? We are a bit short of any Suidae at the moment…