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Photograph by Spencer Millsap
  • April 11, 2014

How a Food Becomes Famous

by Dan Stone
N 52°30'33" E 13°23'25.4"

Nothing defines a country and its people so clearly as a national food—a  dish that, when done right, tastes like the country from where it came.

National foods are so easy to categorize because of what they represent. A few hundred calories can sum up a people’s history, values, and economy. That’s how we know pasta was popularized in Italy, where pre-Renaissance eaters realized the food was cheaply made and easily stored. Sushi’s origin story harkens back to Japan and an era with limited food access other than the nearby ocean. Apple pie became a symbol of American prosperity in the early 20th century thanks to an abundance of apples, planted, in part, by the American legend John Chapman (a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed).

CurrywurstOf course none of those are officially sanctioned national foods. But that’s the point—there is no official sanction, no one person gets to decide. An act of parliament doesn’t make a food widely adored any more than a president can decide whether his people are happy. Foods are collective decisions, chosen and perpetuated over time, tacitly agreed upon by generations all acknowledging that a particular item is our dish, it’s what we eat.

In Berlin, the dish of the past and present is the currywurst—a pork sausage boiled, then fried, then coated with ketchup and curry powder. How it tastes is less important than the fact that it’s everywhere, on corners, in shopping malls, easily found for lunch and for sale late at night. The longstanding proletariat snack is widely recognized as the national dish of Germany.

We wanted to find out how it happened, so we went to the Deutsches Currywurst Museum in Berlin. The museum, where foam sausages and giant dollops of ketchup hang from the ceiling, is a tribute to Herta Heuwer, the woman who invented the currywurst in 1948. As inflation and food shortages hit Germany after World War Two, Heuwer, who owned a fast food stand in Berlin, experimented with new ingredients to pair with sausage. Two of these were ketchup and the curry powder that British soldiers had brought from India. The dish caught on, as much for its good taste as for its common appeal. A cheap, filling and resourceful meal, it nodded toward German ingenuity and the eventual recovery of wounded post-war pride.

Making currywurstCurrywurst is still the leading street food of Berlin. Nearly a billion are served every year. It probably wouldn’t win any culinary awards, but it’s not meant to. There’s lore around it, which is better than any evanescent food craze that chefs or food companies fiddle with. That’s not to say there isn’t room to innovate it. Restaurants and food trucks that serve currywurst have popped up around the world. Never mind that the currywurst was created as an alternative to more expensive meat. One New York restaurant sells a new-age form of the dish—yours with a turnip confit for $12.

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There are 2 Comments. Add Yours.

Continuing the Discussion

  1. How Was Ketchup Invented? – The Plate: Jasmine Wiggins

    […] The British likely encountered ketchup in Southeast Asia, returned home, and tried to replicate the fermented dark sauce. This probably happened in the late 17th and early 18th centuries as evidenced by a recipe published in 1732 for “Ketchup in Paste,” by Richard Bradley, which referenced “Bencoulin in the East-Indies” as its origin. (See “How a Food Becomes Famous.”) […]

    April 21, 201418:07 am
  2. The Vegetable That Terrorized Romans and Helped Industrialize England – The Plate: Rebecca Rupp

    […] During the Civil War, a turnip is what drove Scarlett O’Hara to shake her fist at the heavens and swear that she’d never be hungry again—the implication being that only the starving would stoop to the awful level of turnips. Unfortunately this isn’t far wrong: Turnips, throughout their long and lumpish history, have been the food of cows, pigs, sheep, the desperate, and the poor. (See “How a Food Becomes Famous“) […]

    May 8, 201411:48 pm

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Dan Stone and Spencer Millsap are multimedia journalists for National Geographic magazine. They’re on the move, looking for new ideas and good stories. Tweet them at @DanEnRoute and @Spono.

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