Cincinnati Goetta: A Delectable History

By Dann Woellert

Cincinnati loves goetta.

Since its arrival with nineteenth-century Germanic immigrants, this humble dish has evolved from peasant staple to ubiquitous delicacy. Once upon a time, Cincinnatians found goetta mostly in neighborhood butcher shops, in Over-the-Rhine's so-called Goetta Alley and through Sander Packing, its first commercial producer. Now hungry locals scarf it down at diners and white-linen establishments alike and in everything from egg rolls to Reuben sandwiches. Tracing goetta from its Germanic origins and its first stop in Greater Cincinnati to its largest commercial producers, Queen City Sausage and Gliers, food etymologist and "Goettevangelist" Dann Woellert explores goetta's history in the city that made it regionally famous.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jul 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781439667453

Dann Woellert

Dann Woellert has been in the product marketing world for more than a decade. He has traveled the country in search of "goetta cousins" and has a mission to make knowledge of goetta so prevalent that food writers describe scrapple as "goetta with cornmeal." He writes the blog Dann Woellert the Food Etymologist, which discusses the origins of local and regional foods. He is also part of a new wave of entertainment started at bars in Cincinnati called Standup History, a combination of standup comedy and drunken history. Dann is affiliated with the Cincinnati Preservation Association, the German American Citizens League, the Brewery District and several local historical societies. He is a five-time recipient of the Ohioana Award for Literary and Artistic Achievement.

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Introduction

THE BIG GOETTA PROJECT

Cincinnati has a love affair with goetta. It’s no secret. The top ten commerical producers of goetta in greater Cincinnati make an estimated two and a quarter million pounds of it annually. A true Cincinnatian has one or more of the following cooking utensils: a wort paddle to make beer, an oval plate to serve Cincinnati chili or a giant wooden paddle to stir goetta. After the question Vas you efer in Zinzinnati, the second question is, Hast du ever tasted Zinzinnati goetta? It’s truly amazing that an obscure winter peasant breakfast food has made it front and center of our regional pop culture.

Mention goetta anywhere outside of a fifty-mile radius of Cincinnati, and you’ll get funny looks. But ask anyone inside that loop, and you’ll get a TED Talk on whose is best, how best to prepare it and what condiments should be used to dress it. For those in greater Cincinnati, goetta is a lifestyle. It’s the topic of tall tales and legends. There are T-shirts with goetta sayings and two Goettafests a year. But you can find goetta year-round. Locals know at least one of more than one hundred restaurants that serve goetta in its purest form or concocted into an innovative fusion dish. Most have a favorite local butcher, if they’re not satisfied with the several commercial brands available at Kroger and big-box retailers. Although most like it fried crispy, the crispy vs. mushy debate has sparked family civil wars across the region. And don’t even get started with what to dress it with. That conversation could last for hours.

The hardest thing is describing goetta to outsiders. My oldest friend from grade-school days, Mike, who prefers to dress his goetta with Frank’s hot sauce, describes the origin of goetta as if Scottish haggis and a German sausage got together and produced a really tasty baby. His family comes from at least a four-generation goetta-eating family. I’ve heard others describe it as scrapple’s tastier cousin. I like that description a lot. In food writing, goetta is always the Jan Brady to scrapple’s Marcia. Goetta hasn’t reached national status, yet. Online Scrabble doesn’t recognize goetta as a word. And my iPhone is constantly autocorrecting my texts using goetta. Alexa responds that she doesn’t know what goetta is made of. But then again, she was made in China. Siri does know about goetta, so that’s encouraging.

I have relatives who no longer live in Cincinnati who say that whenever someone mentions goetta in a conversation, it’s like finding a long-lost relative that they even know that goetta exists. This is also the branch of my family who boasts that they’ve never eaten commercially produced goetta, only homemade.

Long before there was Cincinnati chili, cheese coneys and Graeter’s raspberry chip ice cream, there was goetta. Immigrants from northwestern Germany brought the legacy with them over a century ago to remind them of home. Only in the last fifty years has it been more than an obscure cold-weather breakfast food. It’s reached the tipping point of cultural hipness.

Since 2013, the Cincinnati Food and Wine Classic has sponsored an event called Goetta Superstar. It positions three groups of chefs against one another in a live version of Chopped. The teams must use goetta and another secret ingredient to make a cohesive dish. One year, it was goetta and paw paws.

Goetta is mentioned in a song by local bluegrass band Jake Speed & the Freddies, Queen City Christmas: Queen City Eggnog tastes much betta’, when you add a pound of goetta.

Andrew Zimmern tasted goetta at the Six Acres Bed and Breakfast in College Hill in a recent episode of Bizarre Foods. Episode seven of season twelve, titled The Underground Railroad, connected goetta to the many Cincinnati Germans involved in the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement. It may have been fed locally to fugitive slaves, like the Cincinnati 28, a group that journeyed through the creek bed behind the B&B. Six Acres was built in the 1850s by Zebulon Strong, a Quaker abolitionist who helped escaping slaves.

The interesting thing about connecting goetta and fugitive slaves is that goetta is a lot like slave cooking. Goetta is based on taking lesser-quality cuts of meat and extending them with a grain. And that’s exactly what slaves would do in their cooking. They were given the discarded cuts of meat from the wealthy masters and extend them with cooked greens or with a variety of beans. In Germany, the field workers, or heurling, on the large manors of German nobility were given the offcuts of meat from the owners of the manor and created the multitude of grain sausages or gruetzwurst, that birthed our goetta. How interesting would it be to find documentation that these slaves who escaped through Cincinnati had been fed goetta by German immigrant abolititionists, saw the similarity to their cooking and used goetta in their diets in the free communities where they settled in Canada?

Christmas is the busiest season for goetta. Most butchers and commercial producers say they make twice their normal amount during the winter holidays. Serving food is how we show people we love them. And for greater Cincinnatians, serving homemade or even store-bought goetta for breakfast over the holidays to our visiting relatives is the epitome of familial love. In fact, if visiting relatives aren’t served goetta at a family holiday brunch, they might ask, Does my family not love me anymore?!

Celebrities and public figures have chimed in about goetta. It had reached such national exposure that President George W. Bush asked in 2006, What is goetta?

In a 1979 interview with Bill Moyers, Ronald Reagan said this: We lived in a small town (Dixon, Illinois). It was from payday to payday with us, and I can remember one dish that I thought was delicious and it was only later that I realized why we had it. Have you ever heard of oatmeal meat? Well, you make oatmeal and you mix ground meat with it. Then you make a gravy just out of that, and then you serve that in a big pancake-like thing. Well, that was because we couldn’t afford to have that pancake made of all meat. What President Reagan was referring to was hafer grits, or gritzwurst, a cousin to goetta that was common in the rural German immigrant communities of the Midwest.

When Drew Lachey, winner of Dancing with the Stars and 98 Degrees boyband heartthrob, was asked how he ate when training for the show, he said, There’s this stuff called goetta that’s huge in Cincinnati. It’s a German meat product—pork mixed with oats—that goes back a long way. I like to fry up some goetta and have breakfast for dinner. Then, when Drew and his brother Nick Lachey operated Lachey’s Bar and Grille from 2015 to 2018, they had a Hair of the Dog Burger, with goetta, white cheese and a fried egg.

When I started out on the big goetta project, I had the intent of finding that original goetta recipe, the holy grail, the one that would prove where exactly in Germany our beloved goetta had originated. Goetta runs deep in my blood on both sides of my Germanic family. So I wanted to crack the geneaological code of goetta’s origins.

But as I continued my journey, I realized that it would be next to impossible. The history was so far away, and recipes had been so muddled and adapted over the past 150 years. Few people would have clues. Did I expect to find that 175-year-old recipe carried over on the boat, written in Plattdeutsch and in Sutterlein (German cursive) script? Did that even exist? Most greater Cincinnatians can’t speak High German, other than a few words, like danke and prost, let alone Plattedeutsch. Even fewer can read the old script. But I soldiered on, trying to collect what history I could.

Goetta has many ancestors from several different small regions in today’s northwestern German states of Westphalia, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. While I didn’t find the exact village where goetta originated, I did discover a way to find out where a recipe may have originated based on some ingredients.

Today, you can determine how long goetta has been in a family by the way they pronounce it. My maternal grandmother pronounced it gudda and even spelled it Guetta on her recipe. She grew up in a small, one-and-a-half story shotgun Victorian with four siblings on Thornton Street, in the shadow of the Dorsel milling factory two blocks away, where the pinhead oats for goetta were processed and packed for retail sale to homemakers. Her aunt and godmother, Loretta Brosey Dorsel, was married to Jack Dorsel, the grandson of the founder of the Dorsel Pinhead Oatmeal Company, who had a love for old German sausage and, of course, goetta. I inherited furniture that Jack Dorsel made my grandmother, which I call my goetta furniture. My grandmother’s family also lived blocks away from the Corpus Christi Catholic Church among whose Germanic-immigrant parishioners were surely numerous recipes for goetta.

Some recipes I encountered in my search were clearly old. My grandmother had made several notes on how other family members made their goetta. She noted that her mother, Katherine Brosey Muchorowski, used pork flank, a cheaper, fatty, boneless portion of the pork belly between the ribs and the legs, with the beef. A note on the back of the recipe says that her sister’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Westerkamp, used pork necks, which was a very old version. No one today would spend the time to cook the pork necks and then pick the meat off the bone. But back in the day, that was a cheap cut, and it was worth the time for a German hausfrau. Grandma would not have had the time to cook and strip bones like that as she helped her husband run their bakery, but she made the note to document why Mrs. Westerkamp’s goetta was so good. She did that on all of her recipes.

The Guetta recipe of Loretta Muchorowski Ling, spelled as many early Cincinnatians pronounced it. Author’s collection.

The Mrs. Westerkamp my grandmother referred to was her sister Mary Muchorowski Westerkamp’s mother-in-law, Christina Westerkamp. Christina’s parents were from Alsace-Lorraine, which is southwest of the Germanic goetta region, but the family of her husband, Oscar Sr., were butchers from Bavaria. Alex Westerkamp had immigrated just in time to fight in the Civil War and then operated a retail and wholesale butcher shop in the Pearl Street Market that his son Oscar Sr. and grandson Oscar Jr. Bud operated. So the recipe note using pork necks for goetta more likely came through Christina’s line than her husband’s Bavarian line, but she had access to whatever pork parts she desired from her husband’s butchery. This genealogical work is what is necessary to trace the origin of an immigrant recipe, and it also can tell us how an original recipe evolved as it was passed down through the generations.

My paternal grandmother grew up in Covington, Kentucky. As the youngest of five girls, she learned how to cook later in life. Her goetta recipe was good enough for her father-in-law, whose wife’s family had come from a farm in Oppenwehe, Westphalia, right in the center of the Goetta Cradle of Northern Germany, only ten miles to the west of Neunkirchen-Voerden, from where the Finke family, who claim to be the originators of goetta, hailed. When my grandparents moved into my great-grandfather’s house after his wife’s death to help out, he raved to the neighbors about his daughter-in-law’s goetta and barley soup.

I created a Facebook group called Cincinnati’s Oldest Goetta Recipe. Within twenty-four hours, I had over two hundred members, and it now has over one thousand. Most members of this page are locals or expats who have moved out of greater Cincinnati and love and miss their goetta. The page has been a great way to crowdsource surveys on goetta. It became clear from those who submitted the legacy of their recipes that goetta probably originated with the immigrants of Covington from northwestern Germany and quickly made its way across the river before 1900, when it had made it to some of the meat markets at Findlay Market, like Wasslers and Eckerlein. The three oldest recipes submitted by people on the Facebook site had one thing in common: ancestors who came from Westphalia, Germany, and settled in Covington, Kentucky. Although the specific village of origin in Germany remains a mystery, I have narrowed the region of origin down to a parallelogram in northwestern Germany bounded by four cities: Munster, Oldenburg, Hamburg and Hanover. And, I learned a lot along the way of discovery about goetta.

I would like to thank the many people who contributed to the Big Goetta Project. Mark Balasa and Elmer Hensler of Queen City Sausage; Greg Langen of Langen Meats; Billy Finke; Jeffery Finke; Tom Dorsel; Gary Swaim, sales manager of Praire Mills; my high school friend Kyle Drahman, who bought Ammerland and Oldenburg pinkel and arranged a pinkel photo shoot with photographer Anatoli Weingart in Swabia, Germany; Doug and Melanie Nevluk of Maeker’s Meats in Shiner, Texas; Dan Glier; my parents, Roger and Flora Woellert; Ted Swormstedt of the American Sign Museum; Kate Zaidan of Dean’s Mediterranean, for inviting me to teach about the history and making of goetta at the inaugural STIR Immigrant Food at Findlay Kitchen and learning of goetta’s similarity to Lebanese kibbeh; Polly Campbell, for finally getting me to taste Johnny-in-the-Bag sausage; Dick Stehlin; Jim Kluener of the Kluener Meats family; Sandy Hamilton, who carted livermush back from the Carolinas; Debby Van Dyke-Neubauer and her help with understanding the evolution of Dutch balkenbrij; the expert librarians at the Local History Department of the Downtown Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County; the local history librarians at the Kenton County Public Library in Covington, Kentucky; my mother, for teaching me how to cook Crock-Pot goetta; and my maternal grandmother, Loretta Ling, for helping me understand how to distinguish good gudda.

Chapter 1

PORKOPOLIS AND GOETTA

According to the Main Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County on Vine Street, a large section of the Germanic-immigrant Over-the-Rhine neighborhood was known by the nickname Goetta Alley, and Sander Packing was the first known commercial producer of goetta.

Goetta has evolved as cooking methods and appliances have. It originated as a by-product of slaughter, made over open fires in large pots, ground by hand. Before refrigeration, it was made only in the winter months and stored in crocks in pantries with a protective layer of congealed fat. Then came the pressure cooker, the electric meat grinder, the Crock-Pot, the gas grill, the

Reviews for Cincinnati Goetta

[laverack-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The information in this book is excellent and one can really tell the author has a passion for goetta. It contains great food and family history. I didn’t mind that the author used a familiar voice in his writing, but the book really could use some editing to tighten up the book’s narrative.