Coburger Bratwurst

At a Coburg grill stand the fire is beech wood, and every so often the cook tosses in a handful of dry pine cones. Locals call them Kühla, and when the resin catches, the flare lights the underside of the links and the smoke turns sweet and sharp at once, a smell closer to incense than to barbecue. Coburgers have a name for it, Coburger Weihrauch, Coburg frankincense. The links lie across the grate in a long row, thick as a thumb and a hand's length longer than the bread that will hold them, and the casings darken and blister while the fat that drips down sends up the next small flames. This resin smoke is what the town means by the flavor, and it reaches the sausage in a matter of minutes.

The meat is cut and ground coarse, traditionally to about the size of a pea, so a bite breaks into separate nuggets of pork rather than one smooth paste. Beef makes up at least 15% of the mix, and the seasoning is salt, pepper, nutmeg and lemon, with a loose binder of egg. Raw egg was once allowed under a special permit, and whole egg, often pasteurized, is common now. The result is a sausage that sits looser than a fine emulsion: it yields under the teeth, then crumbles a little, and the juice runs out where a tighter sausage would hold it. A cook who turns it too often or too early tears the casing and loses the juice into the coals, so the links stay put until one side has colored properly.

The roll is half of a double Semmel, the kind baked as a joined pair, and in Coburg the usual cut runs vertically from the top. A shallow slot cradles the sausage, and the sausage takes its own length: it runs well past both ends of the bread, and the first bites go to the overhang, hot enough to burn a lip. Mustard goes on at the stand and a paper napkin goes underneath. The crumb of the roll is soft and a little sweet, and it catches the dripped fat that slides down the casing, so by the middle the bread has gone from white to translucent gold. People eat it standing, usually near the market square, with the bread held in one hand and the free end of the sausage in the other.

The pine cones came under scrutiny in 2014, when European limits on polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in smoked food made direct resin smoke a regulatory problem. Coburg's answer was a compromise that stands today: the sausages are seared briefly over the cones, finished on beech charcoal, and the grill sits about three centimeters higher than it used to. The cones stayed because the aroma is what Coburgers expect a Coburger to smell like, and an EU permission for the traditional method kept them in use. Some stands will show a visitor the pile of cones beside the grate, gray-brown and the size of a fist, and a handful goes on only at the sear.

Length is the other rule, and the town enforces it with a statue. The local standard is 31 centimeters raw, and the sausage shrinks as it cooks, so a finished one is shorter, though it still overhangs the roll. A butcher making the real thing sizes the casing to 31 cm and portions the meat so that roughly ten links come from a kilogram. The length gives the grill its shape too: the grate must be wide enough for the links to lie flat side by side, and a stand fills the whole width in a single row, which is why Coburg grills look like long iron benches.

Origin and history

The oldest date attached to the sausage is 1498. A meal plan of the Georgenspital, Coburg's hospital for the poor, is cited for it: each child and each poor person there was to receive two sausages, made from the last pigs slaughtered before Shrovetide. Local sources date the first Coburg sausage differently and the claim is disputed, so 1498 is better taken as the earliest mention commonly cited than as a birth certificate. No record names who first ground the meat coarse, or who first put it over pine cones.

The town's own guardian of the recipe came later. A figure of St. Mauritius, Coburg's patron, stands on the gable of the Rathaus, and since the middle of the seventeenth century Coburgers have read the staff or scroll in his hand as the official measure of the sausage. They nicknamed him the Bratwurstmännle, the little bratwurst man, and he looks down on the market square where the grills stand.

For generations nobody had measured what he held. Estimates for the length ran from 35 to 40 centimeters, until in 1982 the figure's staff was measured at 31 centimeters. The number stuck: a genuine Coburger Bratwurst is 31 cm raw, and the statue that was assumed to hold the ruler turned out to hold the figure that the butchers have worked to ever since.