Four minutes to read.
Dear Travel Journal,
As a traveler, snooping is my distinguishing characteristic. Without it, motivation is missing to leave my comfy hotel, trek busy city streets, poke into museums, read the tiny print on monument plaques or try strange foods.
On holiday, I am nonstop curious. In Berlin—home to the Currywurst Museum—I was curious to eat this iconic food. Eight hundred million currywurst orders in Germany are consumed annually. From Berliners, it was described as a comfort food much like tomato soup is for many Americans.
Confronting a difficult menu, I’ll eat almost any local specialty—at least once. I’m more a man of petty preferences than culinary convictions.
However, as I discovered today, the adage “travel teaches tolerance” isn’t always and forever true. Currywurst teaches intolerance.
This morning, I awoke to crisp, clear, blued-eyed Germanic skies. The kind of day that overpromises. The kind of day that tricks my feet into sightseeing way past their physical comfort zone.
One museum too many, an extra cathedral visit, a long climb to a vista point and, by dusk, I am like a dehydrated runner with leg cramps. Today was no different. Depleted by late afternoon, I needed refreshment.
Trudging along a tree-lined, residential boulevard, half lost and still very hungry, I inhaled the warm, fatty smell of sizzling meat wafting from a curbside shack placed next to a jumble of scruffy dumpsters. Inside, a rather handsome woman in blue-checked pants and a pink top, maybe 50 years old, was grilling sausages.
My nostrils flared. My mouth watered. My first currywurst awaited.
Wetting my lips, I placed my order. One currywurst and the local beer Berliner Weisse.
Pork sausage links sawed into chunks and smothered with a red sauce appeared on a six-inch, canoe-shaped paper plate. Currywurst looks like twisted pig iron unevenly cut with a hacksaw handled by a six-year-old with tremors, then slopped with a florid paint the ruddy color of fake blood from a cheap wartime movie. French fries doused with globs of mayonnaise are the usual side dish.
Following the local custom, dictated by the absence of seating, I ate standing up on the hard pavement. The soles of my feet and my calves kept up a steady complaint. Poking the currywurst into my mouth with a flimsy wooden fork, my heart skipped an arteriosclerotic beat.
Currywurst coats the tongue with a cloying residue. I imagined an amputated human thumb marinated in its own juices. A spongy, soggy, slimy texture. My tastebuds reverted to memories of hospital trays provisioned with grayish, brownish foodstuffs.
Like the Berlin Wall, currywurst is a post-WWII relic. In 1949, an enterprising housewife, Herta Heuwer, traded bootleg booze for ketchup to which she added curry powder. She slathered the concoction on sausages and, thus, invented currywurst.
When Berliners were reduced to eating anything they could scavenge, Ms. Heuwer did her creative best to feed people. Good for her.
Feeling the heaviness in my legs and stomach, swallowing hard, currywurst yanked me back to bombed out Berlin. For fleeting moments between bites, I tried to imagine the desperation and despair of wartime survival.
Under threat of species extinction, compared to starvation, currywurst is delicious.