Blog Mirror: The Wurst Article

An item by a German expatriate living in the UK on what Germans call what most Americans call "hot dogs"

The Wurst Article

Note the presentation.

I'm surprised that in Frankfurt, Wieners are regarded as a delicacy.  When I was a kid, we had them all the time, and I liked them.  I particularly liked "hot lunches" at school, which we rarely got, when we were served steamed hot dogs.

I still like the recollection of how those tasted.

Now days, I only eat hot dogs if I'm at a baseball game. That's about it.  Otherwise, I never do.  I probably had too many fried hot dogs as a kid. 

Yes, my mother fried them. But she was an awful cook.

Anyhow, my grandfather was a meat packer and this article caused me to think of what we called these sausages.  We called them "hot dogs" the American standard word, but my father would call them Wieners.  His father was of 100% Westphalian extraction and had grown up speaking German.  My father could speak it too, but sort of kept that to himself, like many other things in his very quiet personality.  Anyhow, maybe that's why my father used that term for the little mild sausages.

The packing house did make them.  Apparently they made a lot of them during World War Two, as the Army ordered them.  When the war ended the contract for them was suddenly canceled and it turned out to be a big problem for the packing house, as the Army wouldn't order them with the added red dye that is what actually causes them to be that color.  That was an unnecessary added expense, in the Army's view.  

But not for civilians.  The hot dogs turned out to be hard to sell to grocery stores as they weren't the expected pink.  Without it, they're white.

I love sausages, FWIW.  It's probably one of the things that will get me in the end, but then I don't have the American expectation of living perfectly fit until I'm 120 years old. But I'm not keen on Wieners.  Brots, yes, other sausages, you bet.  But these aren't my favorite.

Maybe they would be in Frankfurt.