Drehspieß

On the glass of a German Imbiss, usually taped near the spit, a small sign names what is turning: Döner Kebab, Hähnchen-Döner, or Drehspieß nach Döner-Art. The third label belongs to spits that carry pork or are built mostly from minced meat, and the sandwich made from one is the Drehspieß: shaved meat packed into a split Fladenbrot with shredded cabbage, tomato, onion, and a ladle of sauce. The first thing a pork spit gives off is smell. Fat renders and drips toward the heating element, spits and browns, and a sweet roasted haze drifts out of the shop door well before the counter comes into view. That smell is the reason many people walk in, and the sign on the glass tells them which animal made it.

The spit is assembled before it turns. Cooks stack marinated meat in layers, with a run of lean slices followed by a layer of fattier cut, and press the cone into shape so it stays upright for hours. A pork build carries its own fat, which makes the cone self-basting: the outer face darkens and crisps while the interior stays soft. The cook carves with a long knife in downward strokes, and you can hear it, a faint crackle as the blade passes through the browned crust, then silence in the softer middle. Each portion takes both. Spits come in sizes from a couple of kilograms for a small stand up to forty for a busy shop, and many counters buy them ready-made from one of the several hundred German producers who supply the trade.

The bread decides how the whole thing eats. A round of Fladenbrot is split with a knife and held open over the heat for a few seconds, and it fills with steam that you feel on your fingers through the paper wrapper. The carver lays in the meat first, then cabbage and lettuce for crunch, tomato and raw onion for juice and bite, and finally sauce: garlic yoghurt is the default, with herb, curry, and cocktail sauce as German counter additions. The sauce is what stitches the dry shavings to the bread and to each other. A pork Drehspieß sits closer to Greek gyros than to a classic Döner, and some counters print the gyros name on the board to set expectations; the sandwich keeps the same Fladenbrot, the same salad, the same paper bag.

Pork asks for care at the spit. It has little of the strong flavor that lamb gives a classic cone, so the seasoning and the fat in the stack carry the taste. Too lean a stack eats dry and tight no matter how much sauce goes on. Too much fat pools in the bread and turns the bottom of the sandwich soft and greasy within a few minutes, long before you finish. A good one is eaten fast and hot, while the pork fat is still loose and glossy on the tongue and the edges of the shavings still snap. Left to cool, that same fat sets into a pale coating. The better counters carve from a spit that is still browning at the surface and shedding juice into the drip tray.

The label on the spit has a legal edge. German food-inspection leaflets set the name Döner Kebab aside for sliced beef, veal, or lamb, with mince allowed only up to about 60 percent of the weight; a spit that holds pork, binders, or more mince than that goes under a different name, and a counter running several spits is expected to mark each one. Drehspieß nach Döner-Art is the common wording. The sign works as information for the customer. A diner who avoids pork for religious reasons reads it before ordering, and a diner who wants pork reads it too. In practice the Drehspieß is the pork option on a menu built around the Döner, sold from the same counter, under the same kind of lights, to the same lunchtime queue.

Origin and history

The spit itself arrived in Germany with Turkish guest workers, and its Berlin story has competing owners. Kadir Nurman is credited with selling meat from a vertical spit in bread near Bahnhof Zoo in West Berlin, and he gave 1972 as the year. Mehmet Aygün, another Berlin restaurateur, claims to have done it in 1971, and a Reutlingen cook, Nevzat Salim, claims the idea for his own city earlier still. Nurman's stand is the best known of them, and the idea was never patented, so each claimant's date rests on his own account and on the people who ate there.

The pork spit followed the Döner by some years in the shops. The Greek gyros stand and the Turkish Döner stand shared German street corners through the 1970s and 1980s, and a pork cone turning in a Döner-style shop is a product of that neighbourhood. No record names the first cook to load pork onto a Döner-style spit. The word Drehspieß itself is plain German for a rotating spit, and it gave counters a label that fits any meat, pork included, and German menus still print it that way.

The label it carries today comes from a single document. In 1989 Berlin wrote down what its trade understood a Döner to be, the "Festschreibung der Berliner Verkehrsauffassung für das Fleischerzeugnis Dönerkebap": sliced lamb or beef, a limited share of mince, a fixed list of seasonings. Poultry came into the definition later, and the German food code now carries it. Every spit that falls outside the 1989 line, whether it holds pork or a mince block, has been sold ever since under the name Drehspieß nach Döner-Art, which is where the pork sandwich on today's counters gets its sign.