Broodje Ossenworst

A butcher in Amsterdam lifts a dark, dry-skinned sausage off its hook and lays it on the slicer, and the first thing that reaches the counter is the smell: clove and nutmeg, then oak smoke, then the sweet, cold-cellar scent of beef that has aged for days. The slices come off translucent and mahogany-red, flecked with white fat and ground pepper. They are folded onto a soft white roll, a few at a time, so that the meat drapes over itself in ruffles. Nothing in a broodje ossenworst touches a flame. The raw sausage is the whole filling, and the cutting is the cooking.

Thickness decides the bite. Sliced thin, the sausage yields like pressed ham and the fat melts a little against the tongue. Cut in chunks, it turns chewy and tastes mostly of tallow. A crusty roll fights back and shreds the soft slices as the teeth close, which is why the usual choice is a pillowy white bolletje or puntje that gives way at the same speed as the meat. The first mouthful is cool, faintly peppery and softly smoky, with clove arriving last and lingering. A stale sausage gives itself away at once, because the smoke turns bitter and the meat sours.

The usual partner is a spoonful of Amsterdamse uitjes, small onions pickled in a bright yellow brine coloured with turmeric or saffron. They crunch where the sausage is soft, and their vinegar cuts through the fat in a single sharp pass. Raw sliced onion does the same job with more heat. Some counters add a smear of mustard. Each of these is an accent. The sausage carries the roll, and a roll loaded with too much garnish hides the clove and nutmeg that make it taste of Amsterdam.

Those spices explain the sausage. Ground white pepper, mace, nutmeg and clove are mixed with coarsely minced beef by hand, which keeps the filling loose and open rather than pasty. The mixture is stuffed into casings, hung for a day or two to dry, then cold-smoked over oak or beech chips at a temperature that Slow Food's Ark of Taste entry puts at 32 degrees Celsius or below. Smoking at that temperature leaves the meat raw. The traditional method also calls for aging of at least ten days, and the sausage is meant to be eaten within about a week.

Smoked and unsmoked ossenworst sit side by side in Amsterdam today. Many modern producers use lean beef and skip the long aging, and a butcher who still smokes his sausage, such as De Wit in the Transvaalbuurt, is worth reaching for on the bread. A plain slice of the unsmoked kind tastes of clean beef and spice, and the smoked kind adds a resinous edge that holds up against the onions. Either version belongs on a roll, and ordering one is simple: a broodje ossenworst, with onions, over the counter, and eaten standing up.

Origin and history

Ossenworst appears in 17th-century documents, when Amsterdam was fattening cattle on the Noord-Holland meadows and importing oxen from Holstein and Denmark. The spice mix is a record of the city's trade. Pepper, mace, nutmeg and clove arrived in Amsterdam through the Dutch East Indies company founded in 1602, and a sausage that carries all four was a way of eating the harbor. The name still says ox, though the ox disappeared from the recipe long ago.

The broodje is a younger layer on the sausage. Slow Food records the traditional table use as slices on wheat bread at breakfast or lunch, and as a snack in pubs and at parties, and the roll with pickled onions grew out of that habit. No record names the butcher or the year when a slice of ossenworst was first put into a roll for sale at a counter. Amsterdam's large Jewish community also played an important part in the sausage's trade, and the destruction of that community in the Second World War removed one of the pillars of the Amsterdam ossenworst.

What survives from that break is a handful of family butchers who kept the method going. Slagerij Louman in the Jordaan, in business since about 1890, still sells a smoked ossenworst, and a counter slice from a shop like that, laid over a soft roll with the first pickled onion, is the form in which a 17th-century sausage reaches a lunchtime customer today.