A pan of gritzelwurst – a dead ringer for goetta.

A cousin of mine recently posted about an ancestor of his, unrelated to me,  from the upper Midwest in Lowell, Wisconsin, who was a famous sausage maker in the 1880s.   One of the sausages for which he was famous was Gritswurst.     I recognized that as a dialect form of gruetzwurst, translated from German as “grain sausage”.   Gruetzwurst is the general family that goetta, and its cousins like scrapple, livermush, purkel, and even Louisiana boudin are part of.   It’s the sausage that comes from the leftover cuts of pork at a traditional fall hog slaughter.

This particular ancestor of my cousin was from a little town in Lippe-Detmold, near Westphalia and Hanover, the land where our goetta originated.

August Kuhlman, the great gritzwurst maker of Lowell, Wisconsin, and wife Marie.

In the upper Midwest Germanic immigrant farming regions of Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Michigan, Illinois, and even Perry County, Missouri, gritswurst was traditionally made on the farm from the meat of a boiled hogs head.   The meat was ground, spiced with cinnamon and allspice or pepper and sage, and mixed with steel cut oats.     Some variations added dark raisins, a version that has ancestors in Northern Germany.     Others used pearl barley as the grain, because that was available, or in addition to steel cut oats.     In the Dakotas it is typically made with buckwheat grouts.    It is called gritzwurst, gritza, and even gritzelwurst across the Upper Midwest.

Today only a few meat lockers and family butchers still make it, but typically, like our goetta, use better cuts of meat like pork shoulder instead of pork head.   It’s also pan fried just like goetta, and  served with karo and maple syrup, and sometimes molasses.   In some areas of Illinois it is served on bread with apple butter.   I’ve found no mention of it being dressed with ketchup like goetta is in my family.    Those Upper Midwesterners don’t know what they’re missing!

Unfortunately for the upper Midwest, there’s no Gliers factory or Goettafest that keeps this tradition alive on as large of a scale as in Cincinnati.   But our goetta cousin, gritzwurst, is still being made in the many homes of Germanic immigrants who love that smell of it frying up in a pan.