Best of the wurst

Here's another fine essay by Uncle Joe (Elmer William Sprick), from his book "Fish Stories and Other Lies." Your scrapblog editor's extensive Google image search discovered no photo of this historic and allegedly delicious family delicacy, so the one we're using here may be of some other kind of wurst. We wouldn't know.

GRITWURST

By ELMER "JOE" SPRICK

I received a phone call from Herb Anderson, a gentleman in his 80s. He'd made some gritwurst for me and wanted to drop it off on his way to Red Wing. "I put some extra ingredients in to make it really good -- tongue, heart and raisins," Herb said. "I want you to know I appreciate all the fish you and Doc [Knudsen] have given me."

Herb worked at several jobs over his lifetime, including cook and butcher. I was confident that whatever he had made was a quality product, and I looked forward to having some gritwurst soon for a noon meal.

Mavis was less enthusiastic. "You can give my half to someone else," she said politely.

Gritwurst has been described as a soul food that connects people with their unique heritage. But you aren't likely to find it on a restaurant menu unless you happen to live in a German-American community. And you won't find the word "gritwurst" in a dictionary.

There is probably a good reason one seldom finds gritwurst on a menu. It contains a lot of animal fat -- not the kind of food one wants for breakfast, unless it's a cold winter day and you have been out doing chores for an hour or so. Even then, you should consider splitting wood for the rest of the day. It's the kind of food that "sticks to your ribs," as old-timers say. Today we are more likely to apply that expression to oatmeal.

Gritwurst brings back fond memories to some of us who grew up in rural southeastern Minnesota in the 1930s. We relished a breakfast of gritwurst, fried potatoes and maybe a fresh egg, over easy. A little homemade ketchup could spice things up a bit too. But gritwurst disappeared from the menu when we left our West Albany, Minn., farm to move to Lake City, Minn., as teenagers.

Maybe if we are lucky, we can still find some at our local butcher shop -- or if we still have a friend like Herb.

Our grandchildren would be about as eager to try gritwrust as they would be to attend a lutefisk dinner at a rural Lutheran church. They can choose from 100 different kinds of cereal and pizzas. Our choices as children were far fewer, but the food our mother [Maria Augustine Sprick] made always tasted the best.

If one is reluctant to try a meal of gritwurst, perhaps knowing how it is made will discourage one completely. First, you take the head off a freshly butchered pig and boil it in a really large container until the meat falls off the bone. Sometimes other parts of the pig are added, such as certain organs, hocks or other "spare parts" that one cannot put to a higher and better use. The meat then is ground up and the water that was used to boil it is poured over steel-cut oats, which then are allowed to sit for an hour or so.

A word of caution: Don't try this at home unless you have a good ventilation system!

Once the steel-cut oats have soaked up about as much water as they can, they are mixed with the ground meat, and salt and pepper are added. Those with a more sensitive palate might add a handful of raisins to the mix. It's then baked for an hour or two. With the old wood-burning kitchen stoves, a temperature that got up to 300 to 400 degrees seemed to do the job.

There were several reasons why gritwurst was made in the winter. One very good one was that most rural homes had no electricity for refrigeration. The gritwurst was set out on the back porch to cool, cut into meal-sized chunks and allowed to freeze. On our back porch, it was set alongside a large wooden keg of herring soaked in salt brine, which provided a little variety in a dinner menu that often featured fresh pork chops and sauerkraut or fresh beef steaks and mashed homegrown potatoes.

A good friend, Bob Becker, wrote a book of nostalgic tales about the past. We can identify with his boyhood memories of life on the farm during the 1930s. But why he failed to mention gritwurst in his chapter about farm breakfasts remains a mystery. It's a soul food that connects people with their unique ethnic heritage. You betcha!

Postscript: Herb left us a few years ago for a better place, but once in a while we stop in to give his widow, Ginny, a meal of bluegills. Like Herb, she insists on responsing with an act of kindness -- a gift of raspberries in the summer or a bottle of wine in the winter.