Mettwurst

In the butcher shops of Westphalia and Lower Saxony, a minced-pork product called Mett has been cured and seasoned since at least the sixteenth century. The name combines Low German 'mett,' meaning minced or chopped pork, with 'wurst,' the German word for sausage. 'Mett' descends from Old High German 'maz,' a general term for food or flesh, which shares a Proto-Germanic root with English 'meat.' The compound is purely functional: a sausage of minced flesh.

Two regional forms defined Mettwurst from an early period. In Lower Saxony and Hamburg, the mixture is spreadable, raw, and cured with salt and pepper, sometimes sharpened with caraway or marjoram. In Westphalia, the sausage is smoked over beechwood for days or weeks until firm. Each butcher held his seasoning ratios and smoke times as inherited knowledge passed between generations.

German immigrants carried smoked Mettwurst to the United States in the 1870s and 1880s, opening delicatessens in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Cincinnati where the sausage appeared under its German name. American food inspectors grew cautious about raw pork in the early twentieth century, and federal regulations gradually restricted the sale of uncooked sausages. The smoked Westphalian variety survived in American delis; the raw Hamburg spread largely did not travel.

Today the spreadable northern form is sold the same day it is made and eaten piled on rye bread. The Hamburg variant, seasoned with raw onion and served on a roll called a Mettbrötchen, is a Sunday breakfast standard in northern Germany. Manuscript recipe collections from the sixteenth century document the cured minced-pork preparation under names closely related to 'Mett,' making it one of the longest-attested continuously produced German sausage preparations.