White Hot

A Rochester grill cook lays white hots along the cool edge of the grate and leaves them there for a few minutes, because a link that has never been cured or smoked has no firmed skin to take sudden heat. The casing warms slowly, the fat starts to bead, and the pale gray-pink surface blisters tan and picks up a few dark char lines. Slid over the fire at the end, the link spits and sizzles, and the smell is browning pork with a trace of mustard in it. Started too hot, the casing splits, the juices drop into the coals, and the inside turns crumbly. Zweigle's, the best-known maker, suggests broiling or pan frying and turning the links often so the skin crisps evenly.

The recipe is pork, beef, and veal with a blend of savory spices, packed in natural casing. Zweigle's describes its version as an old family recipe for Weisswurst, the German white sausage, and many Rochester natives call it a Porker. The color comes from skipping the cure, so the raw link looks the shade of cooked chicken and never reddens. In the mouth the grind is fine and soft, the flavor is gently meaty and peppery, and a natural casing gives way with a small pop and a rush of juice. A cured red hot has a tang and a firm snap, and the white hot trades both for tenderness. That softness is why the char matters: the browned skin is the only crisp texture on the plate.

The standard dressing is mustard, chopped raw onion, and a spoonful of Rochester meat hot sauce, a loose, spiced ground-meat sauce that pools in the split bun. The bun is soft and white and steams shut around the link, so the onion supplies the only real crunch and the sauce the heat. Lake Ontario beach cookouts have long featured them, and in Rochester diners the same links lie across a plate of home fries and macaroni salad under that sauce. Whichever way it arrives, the first bite comes fast, while the steam is still coming off the bun and the casing is at its crispest.

White hots began as the economical sausage. The early links were a cheaper alternative to the red hot, made from less desirable cuts, and a local history of the sausage records that early commercial batches carried stale bread as filler. Modern versions use better meat and usually cost more than a standard frank. That history explains the spicing and the sauce: a cheap, mild link needed seasoning in the grind and a loud topping at the bun, and both habits stayed after the filler left. The pale sausage on a Rochester menu today is a cleaned-up descendant of a working-class free lunch.

Zweigle's is the name on most Rochester grocery shelves, but other butchers and packers in western and central New York make their own white hots, including a Syracuse-area producer, so the shade of white, the spice level, and the length of the link shift from one counter to the next. Zweigle's also sells the cured red hot in the same case, and the uncured white link is the one that wants the cooler edge of the grate and a patient cook. A pack at a Rochester cookout still reads as a local flag, a brown stripe of mustard on a link the color of bread.

Origin and History

Nobody can say for certain who made the first white hot. Rochester's German butchers worked from Bavarian-style white sausage recipes, and the credit lands on different shops depending on who is asked. Frederick Tobin, the first president of Tobin Packing Company, later said it was first handed out at the Ottman Brothers' establishment on Front Street, with a recipe that came over from Germany. Other accounts credit Max Russer, a butcher with a shop at Maple and Ames Streets, though his son Robert is reported to have said the Russer company was among the first to make white hots in Rochester, not the first. Zweigle's names an old family Weisswurst recipe and gives no year for it.

Tobin's version of the story is the most detailed one on offer, and it rests on his own memory. Front Street's saloon-butchers commonly gave sausages away with drinks, and the Ottmans handed out white hots as free lunch until customers began buying them to carry home. By Tobin's telling, he ran the Rochester Packing Company from 1921, disliked the stale bread in the early commercial recipe, and tried to stop production, until salesmen warned that dealers would drop the company's red hots if the white ones went. Fresh bread went in. Government inspectors then ruled that links with bread in them must be labeled imitation sausage, and the recipe was changed to the pork, beef, and veal formula used today.

The earliest dated sales are scattered. A grocer in Salamanca, in the state's far southwest corner, advertised "Home Made White Hots" on September 29, 1933. In August 1934 the Rochester Times-Union reported an Ottman stand selling them at the Centennial Exposition at Edgerton Park, which moved a saloon free-lunch sausage out to a fairground crowd with money in hand and a bun to buy.