The best of the WURST
Adam Newey visits a Nuremberg exhibition devoted to the city’s famous sausage
S IZE, it turns out, really does matter: particularly in the case of the German sausage, or, to be more precise, the Nuremberg sausage, which must be no longer than 9cm and no weightier than 25g. Germany, it is said, is home to some 1 500 varieties of sausage — more than there are types of cheese in France. What distinguishes the Nuremberg sausage from those found in other parts of the country is not just its dainty proportions, but also its longevity — they’ve been making these delicately flavoured bangers here for 700 years.
I came to Nuremberg intrigued by reports that it had opened a museum devoted to this extraordinary porky heritage, along the lines of the “currywurst” museum in Berlin. This should have been the cue for bad puns about “the world’s wurst museum”, but I was wrong — although there’s no permanent memorial, there is, for the next few months, a fascinating exhibition in the city museum all about the life and times of the Nuremberg sausage (or Nürnberger bratwurst , to give it its proper German name). And it certainly whets the appetite for what is undoubtedly this remarkable Bavarian city’s most significant contribution to European cuisine.
On entering the exhibition, I was excited to see that Schubert had written a polka to the bratwurst (less so when it turned out to be not by Franz but by the rather less well-known, and entirely unrelated, Wilhelm). And there was no doubting that the history of the Nuremberg sausage goes hand-in-hand with that of the city. The inclusion of mace, pepper and marjoram in the sausage is testament to Nuremberg’s eminence as a trading city in the Middle Ages. In 1614, the local butchers inaugurated an annual parade through the streets carrying a monster sausage 400m long (sadly, this tradition has not survived). It is said, entirely apocryphally, that the bratwursts got their diminutive dimensions so that they could be posted to hungry travellers through keyholes in the city gates after the nightly curfew. More likely it was a canny response to a spike in pork prices in the late 16th century.
The whole banger business is tightly regulated, as you might expect. There are statutes governing the trade in pork and the quality of sausage production dating back to 1315, when the office of sausage supervisor, or Würstlein , was established. The “serving norms” — traditionally they come either three in a bun, or on a pewter plate in combinations of six, eight, 10 or 12 — were apparently laid down at the legendary Bratwurstglöcklein restaurant, established in the 1400s and flattened during World War 2. These days, as a rule, they are to be eaten with mustard or horseradish — for traditionalists, ketchup is verboten . The flavour is moderately spicy, with the marjoram note helping to lighten the overall effect. They are, in short, extremely moreish.
My visit to the city coincided with the opening of the Christmas market, where there was no shortage of stalls selling bratwurst and glühwein and handcrafted Nutcracker men. The opening ceremony is presided over by the “Christkind” — in theory the embodiment of the Christ child and bringer of gifts on Christmas Eve — a local girl who is elected to the role every two years. Dressed in golden robes, curly blonde wig and crown, she appears on the balcony of the magnificent 14th-century Frauenkirche on the market square to deliver a prologue in verse, spreading good cheer and declaring the market open. It’s a funny sort of job, a bit like a cross between fairy godmother and city ambassador. In an unusually pope-ish touch for a Lutheran city, she gets a Christkindmobile to ferry her between engagements.
Over lunch — sausages, what else? — with Wolfram from the tourist office, I asked if this opening ceremony was as old as the market itself, which was first documented in the early 1600s. He looked a little sheepish. “Actually no, it was . . . Adolf Hitler who started it.”
Nuremberg, in common with the rest of the country, has a truly dreadful burden of history to bear, but it bears it truthfully and well. The rallies are memorialised at the Congress Hall, the largest piece of Nazi-era architecture still standing, and the trials at the place where they were held, in the Palace of Justice.
The Christkind’s prologue, written after the war, is all about rebirth and renewal, transience and continuity — appropriate for a city that was all but destroyed 70 years ago. The post-war reconstruction, though highly sympathetic to the original, is not a precise replica, and this lends it a curiously ghostly air, like something that’s both there and not there at the same time. The vast majority of Nuremberg’s medieval and Renaissance glories may have vanished, but the place endures. Along with its bratwurst, of course. —