Many years ago — and in a different economic reality — I was paid by a large American law firm to be their European IT Manager which position (whilst based in London) also involved quite a lot of (business-class) travel to their other European offices, inc. Paris, Düsseldorf & Frankfurt. They later opened another outpost in Rome as well, but by then I’d been made redundant, so missed out on spending their Diners Club dollars there unfortunately (and I also never quite managed to swing a freebie tour of the Far East offices in Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai, but hey!). That said, the other European offices were fun and the level of expenses they’d happily sign off on, meant that eating out at every opportunity wasn’t a strain on my pocket. This was, in case you’d not already guessed, before 2008…
I enjoyed visiting the Paris office — of course I did — located as it was on the Champs-Élysées, strangely, even then, there was a large McDonald’s just up the road from our offices which was always rammed with mainly young Parisians — and the odd tourist as well I guess — despite that everywhere around them were some of the best French restaurants anywhere, cooking amazing food and not all of it even at tourist/oligarch levels of eye-watering prices, so no reasons not to take a long lunch and extended evening meal…
In Germany, I preferred Düsseldorf of the two German cities. Less buttoned down, an easy stroll or taxi-ride across the Rheinkniebrücke bridge into the Altstadt area where all the good (i.e. non-businessmen targeted) bars and restaurants were located. Frankfurt, being Banker Central as it is/was, remains much stuffier, more formal, with less (obvious) outward fun or enjoyment, all up their own arses and “Herr, Dr, Dr” titles being insisted upon in the office hierarchy.
Buuuuuut, one thing I didn’t know then and that the new book, “Wurstologia” highlighted, was that the wonderfully named Zeppelinwurst liver-sausage was invented in 1909 (and subsequently patented) by a Stephan Weiss in his small butcher’s shop in Frankfurt…
… in a building on Freßgass (Große Bockenheimer Straße 31) that I unknowingly passed daily en-route from hotel to office.
Something else I — tangentially learned — was that his business likely must have suffered somewhat during WWI as the amount of cow intestines needed in manufacturing the Zeppelin airships beloved by their armed forces — a mind-boggling ¼ million cows died so their guts (also known as goldbeater’s skins) could be used to produce the bags that held the hydrogen gas in each Zeppelin — meant that sausage making was outlawed by the government all over Germany as well as in the allied or those occupied parts of Austria, Poland and northern France.
Someone said
“the German war machine had to choose between long-range bombing and wurst. It chose the former.”
In my German families naturally very efficient way, each butcher was required to handover every set of guts from those animals they killed and they were also regularly inspected to ensure none were held back (although I’m pretty sure that the butcher’s family in practice didn’t want for hand-made sausages still) and that this mandate was being followed. Once delivered to the Zeppelin manufacturers, the skins were wetted, stretched out and then dried again, bonding together to make perfect hydrogen bags.
Something else I found as was that the word “wurst” comes from the Proto-West Germanic *wursti which means (“something turned or twisted”), so that fits the bill as well.
These sausages are still being produced; one of the approx 1,000 variants of sausages that “Wurstologia” claims for Germany. I’ll do my best to document them all…
