Currywurst

Currywurst is sliced pork sausage covered in a ketchup-based sauce seasoned with curry powder, served on a paper plate with a small wooden fork, sold from metal-sided Imbiss stands on street corners across Berlin. Herta Heuwer, who ran a food stall in the Charlottenburg district of West Berlin, documented her sauce formula on September 4, 1949, and the combination she invented became the defining street food of postwar West Berlin. The name joins 'Curry,' the English-derived commercial spice blend, with 'Wurst' (sausage).

Heuwer obtained ketchup and curry powder from British soldiers stationed in the Allied occupation zone. Britain had long imported curry powder from India as a shelf-stable commercial product, and postwar military rations included it. Heuwer experimented with proportions until she produced what she trademarked as 'Chillup,' registering the recipe in 1959. The specific formula was never fully disclosed before her death in 1999.

The dish spread through West Berlin's recovering snack-bar economy during the 1950s. By 1960 a Currywurst was the standard offering at Imbiss counters throughout the western half of the city. It jumped to Hamburg in the 1960s and became nationally known after German reunification in 1990, when East Berliners encountered West Berlin's street food scene directly for the first time and found it waiting on every corner.

Berlin opened the Deutsches Currywurst Museum in 2009 to document the dish's cultural history. It drew a million visitors before closing in 2018. Germans eat roughly 800 million Currywürste per year. The Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg produces its own factory-branded Currywurst at the employee canteen and has sold more units of it, by some measures, than several car models.