Bockwurst

The name first appears in writing in 1827, in Johann Andreas Schmeller’s Bayerisches Wörterbuch, which describes the bockwurst and bock beer as a traditional Munich lunch. The product and its name were therefore already established in Bavaria by that date. A second version, from Berlin and far more widespread, places the invention in 1889: the restaurateur Robert Scholtz is said to have served, on the occasion of the autumn start of the university year, fine veal-and-beef sausages prepared by the Jewish butcher Benjamin Löwenthal, washed down with a Tempelhofer Bock beer from which they are said to have borrowed their name. The earlier Bavarian mention deprives this story of its force: it recounts Berlin’s adoption of a sausage already known elsewhere, not its creation, and rests on no primary source.

The sausage’s name comes from the beer, and the beer’s name comes from a place name. The word Bock derives from Einbeck, a Hanseatic town in Lower Saxony renowned from the fourteenth century for its strong dark beer: exported southwards, Einbecker beer saw its name deformed in Bavarian pronunciation until it became Bock. The sausage inherits this chain, which links a medieval beer of the North to a nineteenth-century Munich snack.

In the forcemeat, the characteristic aromatic is fresh chives, which some recipes replace or supplement with parsley. This fresh herb presupposes rapid consumption and rules out any prolonged drying, which places the bockwurst among the short-keeping products. It belongs, moreover, to the family of brühwurst, scalded sausages: most often hot-smoked before cooking, which gives it its browned hue and varying smoke intensity from maker to maker.

The use of veal sets it apart from bratwurst and is most often replaced by pork; common versions contain about half, sometimes less. No product specification fixes its recipe: the composition varies from one manufacturer to another, within the sole limits of the Deutsches Lebensmittelbuch (the German food code), whose Leitsätze für Fleisch und Fleischerzeugnisse (« its guidelines for meat and meat products ») require a minimum of 8 per cent muscle protein for this designation. The code, moreover, takes pork and back fat as its reference raw materials, which shows how far the Berlin legend of veal and beef stands from the everyday industrial product.

In Berlin, the bockwurst has long counted among the sausages of the Imbiss, the fast-food stands, alongside the currywurst and the knackwurst. It is eaten there in a schrippe, the local bread roll, sharpened with a medium-hot mustard. Its use changed in nature over the twentieth century: originally tied to the spring season of Bock beer, it became an ordinary street food, available year-round, as the sausage moved into mass retail.