If I had a nickel for every time a customer tells me that our bratwurst isn't authentic, because it isn't like the one they had in Germany, I wouldn't be rich, but I'd definitely be able to afford a nice meal!
I love that customers want to compare what we make here in Wisconsin to what they tasted in Germany. But it also drives me a little crazy, because while they're right that our brats don't taste like many of the German brats, they're wrong in assuming that if they don't taste just like what they had in a German town, our brats aren't "authentic."
There are sausage purists out there who think all of our wursts should be exactly like what they tasted when they were in the Motherland, but there are a lot of ways the sausage we make is different, and maybe even better than what was left behind in Germany.
You see, the bratwurst didn't come to Wisconsin as a museum piece from the old country. It came with people. People trying to rebuild a sense of home. So this week, with Prost! Das Fest Wisconsin coming up, that's the story I want to tell: how the bratwurst became the National Sausage of Wisconsin.
You know what I mean.
German Immigration to Wisconsin
Put yourself in a German village in the 1850s. Crop failures keep coming. Farms are being carved up or swallowed by consolidation, and there's no land left for the younger sons. And if you're an idealist, it's worse: the liberal revolutions of 1848 have just failed, and the people who fought for them are fleeing.
Do you know what else happened in 1848?
Wisconsin became the 30th state in the United States of America, and we wanted immigrants to start pumping up our population.
In fact, we wanted them badly enough to advertise! In 1852, the state created a Commission of Emigration that printed pamphlets in German, Norwegian, Dutch, and English, handed them out across Europe and at the ports of New York, and placed ads in more than nine hundred newspapers inviting immigrants to settle in Wisconsin.
This multinational marketing campaign more or less said: come to Wisconsin! We have land! We have work! We want you!
Now imagine one of those pamphlets landing in the hands of down-on-their-luck villagers in Germany. To them, Wisconsin probably sounded like a paradise.
Land you could actually own. Work that paid. Nobody jailing you over your politics. That's what those families believed they were sailing toward, and for a whole lot of them, Wisconsin delivered.
They came wave after wave, between 1845 and 1900. By 1900 there were more than 268,000 German-born people in Wisconsin, about one in ten of us, and by 1950 Germans were the leading ancestry in 41 of our 72 counties. Today more than a third of Wisconsinites claim German heritage, the highest share of any state in America!
Bringing Over The Bratwurst
It'd be fun to think of Fritz or Hans or whomever loading up a steamer trunk with his beloved bratwurst to bring on his ocean trip, but that wasn't the case...perishable sausage wasn't a smart use of space!
No, instead, you brought clothes, a few tools, the family Bible, and the recipes. A few were written down in cherished notebooks. Most were carried in muscle memory, in recipes memorized standing next to parents and master sausage makers. You couldn't pack a bratwurst, but you could pack the knowledge of how to make one.
Sausage is everywhere, but bratwursts are a decidedly German food, which raises the question: what is a bratwurst and what isn't a bratwurst?
Let's start with the name itself. Most people assume "bratwurst" comes from "braten", German for pan-frying or roasting.
That is incorrect.
It actually comes from an older word: "Brät", finely chopped meat, plus "Wurst", the German word for sausage. The paper trail on this word is old: Nuremberg has records of its grilling sausages back to 1313, and a Thuringian archive holds a convent bill from 1404 recording a penny paid for sausage casings, which is the first written mention of the famous Thuringian bratwurst.
In 1432, the city of Weimar issued a butchers' ordinance regulating what could go into a bratwurst: no spleens, no kidneys, no hearts, no unsuitable scraps. That's a food purity law written 84 years before the famous German beer purity law of 1516. Germans regulated their sausage before their beer. That tells you where the bratwurst sits in the culture.
Take that, brewers and your obsession over your Reinheitsgebot!
Not Just One Bratwurst, Many
To the person who tells me my bratwurst isn't "authentic," here's my response: it's almost impossible to make a truly authentic German sausage because there are so many recipes and so many variations.
Each state, city, village, and butcher shop has its own variation, and there are literally dozens of bratwursts you could try:
- Nürnberger Rostbratwurst — tiny, marjoram-scented, and sized to fit through a jail-cell keyhole (that's the story, look it up).
- Thüringer — long, lean, and so protected under EU law it legally must be at least 15 centimeters and made in Thuringia.
- Kulmbacher — thin, fine-textured, veal-heavy, seasoned with nutmeg and lemon peel.
- Coburger — coarse, simply seasoned, bound with a raw egg, and traditionally roasted over pinecones.
The list goes on and on, so let's not belabor the point, and instead just acknowledge that expecting Lake Geneva Country Meats to make a bratwurst that tastes just like the one you had several beers deep in Munich at Oktoberfest is unrealistic. Bratwurst is special, local, and unique in Germany.
But what we can talk about is how the American style of bratwurst started to evolve.
The Butcher Shop on the Corner
As the immigrants landed in Wisconsin, they were homesick in a way most of us can't imagine: no phone calls, no flights home, and letters that took weeks to go back and forth. Wherever they settled, one of the first things they built was a butcher shop. As the Recollection Wisconsin project puts it, immigrant butchers "drew crowds eager for a taste of the old country." Corner butcher shops were an institution for the new Wisconsinites, right up there with the church and the singing club. They smelled like home — and as an old commercial claimed, scent is the sense most strongly tied to memory.
These immigrants didn't just build little corner shops, they also built massive brands. Fred Usinger was an apprentice sausage maker from Wehen, Germany, who landed in Milwaukee in the late 1870s, went to work in a small butcher shop on Third Street, bought the business, married the owner's niece, and founded Usinger's in 1880. It's still run by his family on Old World Third Street, four generations later.
Oscar F. Mayer left Bavaria in 1873 at fourteen years old and started as a butcher boy in Detroit. By 1883 he had left for Chicago and opened a shop with his brothers in a German neighborhood. Opening-day sales: $59 or about two grand today. Word got out that he was making good stuff, and he scaled quickly, as the neighborhood flocked to his shop for old-world sausages, and in 1919 the family bought a bankrupt packing plant in Madison, making Wisconsin home base for one of the biggest names in American meat.
And more recently, in 1945, Ralph and Alice Stayer, descendants of German and Austrian immigrants, bought a small market in Johnsonville and started making bratwurst from an old family recipe traced back to 19th-century Austria that perhaps made its way here in a steamer trunk. Ralph liked to tell about an early customer who ordered ten pounds of brats and forty of hamburger, then flipped the ratio on his next visit because the brats were such a hit. Today that Austrian family recipe is the largest sausage brand by revenue in America, sold in more than 45 countries.
That history is personal for me. What do the names Usinger, Mayer, Stayer, and Leahy all have in common? They're all in the Wisconsin Meat Industry Hall of Fame. Yep: my grandparents John and Rita Leahy are in that fine institution right alongside Oscar Mayer, Fred Usinger, and Ralph & Alice Stayer. Our shop is part of the same story this article is telling, and I never get tired of that.
What's So Special About Wisconsin?
Germans went everywhere in America. Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine was one of the most German neighborhoods in the country. The Texas Hill Country filled up with German farmers and butchers in the 1840s. Bucyrus, Ohio had enough sausage pride to fight Sheboygan in court about which city was the Bratwurst Capital of America.
So why is Wisconsin bratwurst country in a way nowhere else is?
Part of it is concentration; nowhere else were Germans such a big share of both the cities and the countryside, with churches that preached in German and schools that taught in it keeping the culture alive for generations. Also, we need to look at what happened to the sausage everywhere else.
In Texas, German meat-market owners facing brutal heat and no refrigeration smoked their unsold beef, "the barbecue and sausage was just a derivative of having fresh meat and no refrigeration," as one Elgin market family put it, and the German sausage got swallowed whole by Texas barbecue.
In Cincinnati, immigrants stretching butchers' scraps with oats created goetta, a breakfast food instead of a dinner sausage. Everywhere else, the inheritance evolved into something with a new name. Only here in Wisconsin with our cool climate, meat markets in every German town, and a brat-fry culture that made fresh sausage a public event, did the bratwurst stay fresh, stay on the grill, and stay a bratwurst.
Bratwurst, American Style
The Germans in Wisconsin kept the bratwurst going, but it began to evolve away from the sausage they knew in the old country.
In Germany, many bratwursts leaned on veal; here, pork took over. Veal is expensive. Pork is cheap.
The grind got coarser. The seasoning drifted away from delicate, hard-to-find herbs like marjoram, and garlic moved into the blend.
It's America. Bigger, bolder, more, more, more!
Then the inclusions. While Germans focused on "pure meat," we started adding "stuff." Cheddar cheese. Green peppers. Mushrooms. Cherries. Macaroni noodles. Gummi bears!
These are all real things that we've added to brats at Lake Geneva Country Meats, and other Wisconsin butchers have added even more crazy items that are unheard of in Germany.
German rules allow 10% water addition and no binders in their bratwurst. Earlier this summer I watched the head of the German Butchers' Association make fresh sausage at a demo, working that water in a little at a time. The meat kept absorbing the water, and turned silky, and by the end he had that very fine, almost hot-dog-like texture German brats are famous for. His seasonings stayed in the realm of salt, white pepper, marjoram, and mace. The end result was a smooth, mild sausage that represents technical perfection, but not necessarily the most flavorful thing until you add kraut and mustard.
In contrast, American law allows for only 3% water addition and binders can be used. Between those rules, and taste preferences, our brats end up coarser in texture. Combined with all of the seasonings and additions I just outlined, that means our brats have turned into flavorful, inventive meals of their own.
Our brats are not like German brats, just like our beers are not like German beers. It's okay. There's a place for both styles.
I love watching German butchers work, and I love enjoying German sausage in Germany, but if you gave me a choice, I'd take what we do at Lake Geneva Country Meats over what happens in Germany every day of the week.
Come Prost With Us
Want to get in on German fun yourself? Prost! Das Fest Wisconsin runs July 31 through August 2 at the Kenosha County Fairgrounds in Wilmot, featuring three days of brats, dancing, market hall, bier, and more Gemütlichkeit than you can shake a pretzel at. We're honored to be the official bratwurst of the fest.
A hundred and fifty years ago, a brat on a roll was a taste of the old country for somebody homesick in a new land. Today it's just the taste of a Wisconsin summer festival celebrating our German heritage. Same sausage, whole new story. I hope you'll come share one with us.
Cheers...or should I say Prost!
Nick
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