Bockwurst

Bockwurst appeared in Berlin in the spring of 1889, when butcher Wilhelm Löwenfeld began making a mild veal-and-pork sausage to pair with the season's Bockbier. The sausage was paler and finer-grained than the hearty Bavarian varieties, seasoned with chives and parsley rather than heavy spice. Löwenfeld sold it from his shop near the Dönhoffplatz, and Berlin food writers noticed it within a season. By 1900 it was the expected snack at the city's beer gardens.

The name traces back not to a goat but to a town. Bockbier comes from a Bavarian mangling of Einbeck, a Lower Saxon brewing city whose powerful export ales were called "ein Bock" by southern tongues. The horned animal on bock beer labels is a pun invented after the fact. Bockwurst took the beer's name and inherited a double corruption: a goat that is really a town, and a sausage that is really a seasonal marketing decision.

As German emigration swept the Atlantic after 1880, the sausage traveled with it. American butchers kept the name but changed the formula, working with pork rather than veal and sometimes adding paprika. New York's kosher delis produced an all-beef version by the 1920s, sold at pushcarts with mustard and a hard roll. Each version claimed the original name while containing entirely different contents.

In postwar Germany, Bockwurst became the sausage of train station kiosks and stadium concessions, sold pre-cooked in vacuum packaging and dropped into hot water for service. The spring Bockbier season that gave it a name still exists. Some Munich breweries pair the two as Löwenfeld once intended, though most buyers today have no idea the sausage ever had a seasonal reason for being.