Highlights Archives
Fire Up the Grill! It's Bratwurst Time!
Nothing quite says Wisconsin like bratwurst and Sheboygan. The "wurst city in the world" celebrates in a big way the first weekend in August with Bratwurst Days. Although Wisconsinites consume all different kinds of sausages, only the bratwurst has achieved iconic status. Since 1953 Sheboygan has paid homage to its favorite kind of wurst, though bratwurst had been a favorite picnic food in Sheboygan and other parts of Wisconsin for more than a century.
Bratwurst and its close companion the semmel (hard roll) share a past deeply rooted in German culture. Wisconsin's German immigrants brought their food traditions with them to the United States, introducing their long repertoire of sausages for virtually every meal of the day. In German, "brat" means fry and "wurst" means sausage.
Although sausages are popularly associated with Germans, Wisconsin Indians, like people elsewhere in the world, discovered long ago that meats could be preserved in bags made of animal skins and organs. Pemmican, a mix of meat, wild rice, herbs and berries (in the Upper Midwest version of this common Native American food), was widely used during the fur trade as a high-calorie food, and it helped to sustain early white settlers through the winter. Home sausage making was a common fall ritual for Indians and white settlers alike in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin's German immigrants helped to take sausage making out of the home and into a booming business. Beginning in the mid-19th century, butcher shops in towns like Milwaukee, Sheboygan, Madison, Jefferson and Watertown became known for the various ways they combined meats and basic seasonings, creating endless varieties of sausages, each with a flavoring of its own: blutwurst, mettwurst and bockwurst to name just a few.
Many of those 19th-century establishments are still in business today, selling locally, regionally, even nationally. Usinger's, for example, still operates out of the same Milwaukee building it began dispensing sausages out of in 1880. Word of mouth from hungry wanderers led "Aunt Sally" and her husband Milo to turn her popular homemade sausages into a business, Little Pig Sausage in the 1830s. This 1926 article, written when the origins of the Jones family's "Little Pig Sausage" business were still fresh in local memory, tells their story. Near Sheboygan, a brat stand opened in Howards Grove around 1920 and the Come-on-Inn began serving brats year-round. Sheboygan's Johnsonville Sausage began producing sausage from an old family recipe in 1945 and is today the nation's leading manufacturer of bratwurst.
Today, bratwurst is a prominent, almost compulsory, feature of community festivals, picnics, county fairs and fund raisers, like the biannual "World's Largest Bratfest" held in Madison since 1984 by Sentry Foods.
:: Posted August 3, 2005
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