Nürnberger Rostbratwurst: what it is, how to order it, what to avoid

Overview

The Nürnberger Rostbratwurst is a small sausage, and the smallness is the point. It is roughly the length and thickness of a finger, made of coarsely ground pork in a thin natural casing, and seasoned above all with marjoram, which you can see as green-gray flecks through the skin and smell before the plate reaches the table. It is grilled, traditionally over a beechwood fire, until the casing tightens and browns in places. One is two bites. Nobody eats one.

Its claim to the city is legal, not sentimental. Since 2003 the name has been a protected geographical indication in the European Union, and the specification is unusually strict about place: a sausage may be sold as a Nürnberger Rostbratwurst only if it was made within the city of Nuremberg itself, not merely in Franconia or in Bavaria. The same specification fixes the size, the weight range and the seasoning. So the word on a menu is a statement of origin that can be checked, which is rarer than it sounds for a sausage.

The city has regulated its butchers’ bratwurst since the late Middle Ages, and the tradition of keeping it small is genuinely old. Why it is small is another matter. The favorite story says the sausages were made thin enough to be passed through a keyhole, so that taverns could keep feeding drinkers after the city’s curfew had locked the doors. Other versions credit thrift, or the price of salt and spice. None of them rests on a document anyone has produced; they are folklore, and good folklore, but a reader should treat the keyhole as a joke the city tells about itself rather than as history.

What to order

There are two ways the sausage is actually eaten, and they answer different hungers.

• Drei im Weggla — “three in a roll”, in the Franconian word for a bread roll. Three grilled sausages laid side by side in a split crusty roll, with mustard. It is a street snack, bought at a grill stand and eaten standing up, and it is the version most visitors meet first. Ask for it by that name; the phrase is the order.
• By the plate — in a sit-down tavern the sausages come in counts, usually six, eight, ten or twelve, often on a pewter plate. Six is a light meal; eight to ten is a normal one for someone hungry; twelve is a statement. The sides are fixed by habit: sauerkraut, or a vinegar-dressed potato salad (Kartoffelsalat), and sometimes both, with a dab of grated horseradish (Meerrettich) beside the mustard.

The mustard deserves a word. Ask for Senf and expect a medium or hot one. The sweet mustard many visitors associate with Bavarian sausages belongs to a different dish in a different city, and asking for it here is the order that most clearly marks a newcomer — harmlessly, and it may simply not be on the table.

One variant is worth knowing because it surprises people: Blaue Zipfel, also called Saure Zipfel. The sausages are not grilled at all but simmered in a broth of vinegar, onion and spice, which turns the casing a faint bluish gray and the meat sharp and soft. It is served in its broth with bread, it is an acquired taste, and it is entirely traditional. If a menu offers both, the grilled one is the city’s emblem and the sour one is the local’s alternative.

What to avoid

The real risk is not a bad sausage; it is a different sausage under a borrowed name.

Size is the first test. A Rostbratwurst that is a hand’s length long, or thick enough to need cutting, is not this sausage, whatever the board says. That is the larger Franconian bratwurst, or the long Thüringer Rostbratwurst from the neighboring state, which carries its own protected name and is a fine thing in its own right. Neither is the one the city is known for.

Look for the marjoram. A pale, smooth, uniformly pink interior with no visible herb is a generic pork sausage that happens to be small. The real thing is coarse-textured and flecked.

Watch how it was cooked. The emblem is grilled over a fire and arrives with color on it. Sausages that are pale all over and sitting in water, or reheated on a flat griddle from a tray of precooked ones, have lost what makes them worth ordering. At a grill stand, the sausages on the grate in front of you are the information; a stack kept warm off to one side is not.

Outside the city the name is often stretched. Packets in supermarkets elsewhere, and menus in other countries, use “Nuremberg sausages” loosely for any small pork link. Inside the protected name, a package should say it was produced in Nuremberg; a product that says “Nürnberger style” or avoids the full name is telling you, carefully, that it is not one.

Practicalities

A Drei im Weggla from a grill stand costs roughly €4 to €6. A tavern plate of six with a side runs roughly €10 to €15, and each step up in count adds a few euros. A roll priced well below that range usually means precooked sausages; a plate priced well above it usually means the room, the view of the castle, or a menu written for groups.

The grill stands work best around midday, when turnover is fastest and the sausages on the grate have just gone on; by late afternoon on a quiet weekday some keep a reserve warm at the edge of the fire. In the tavern the plate is a lunch as much as a dinner.

Between late November and Christmas Eve the Christkindlesmarkt fills the Hauptmarkt, and the roll of three becomes the market’s default food, eaten with mulled wine in the cold. Expect lines at every grill stand in the evenings and markedly shorter ones in the morning.

Grill stands are often cash only, and the amounts are small enough that coins are the practical answer. Most sit-down taverns take cards, though some older ones still prefer cash; rounding up the bill is enough.

Eat them hot and fast. Grilled sausages this thin cool within minutes, and the casing that snapped at the first bite goes leathery by the last.