It is the most typical fast-food dish of German cuisine. Every year Germans consume 800 million sausages with curry sauce, of which 70 million in the Berlin! Popular lunch food for those in a hurry, curry sausage costs no more than a few euros.

Unless, of course, you choose its sophisticated version, which since 2018 has been served at the ultra-luxurious Adlon Hotel, next to the Brandenburg Gate, for 26 euros. The recipe remains “secret”, but it’s clear that the sauce includes exotic ingredients such as mango, lemongrass and anise. The decoration of the plate is completed by a … gold leaf. An Adlon representative claims that the hotel’s elite customers order, on average, 800 portions a month.

The oldest curry sausage…

According to the prevailing version, this delicacy first appeared in September 1989 in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, when Herta Hoever, owner of a local “fast food” restaurant, was experimenting with new flavors to pass the time. There he got his inspiration for the famous sauce with tomato, curry, Worcestershire sauce and other spices.

Still others say that at some point she created the curry sauce by coincidence or rather out of necessity, because she ran out of mustard and started improvising. Be that as it may, in 2003 the city government of Berlin honored Herta Hoever with a special plaque on the site where her shop was located.

The author Uwe Thiem claims, however, that as early as 1947 he had tasted sausage with curry sauce in Hamburg. In his book The Discovery of Currywurst, published in 1993, Tim tells of another cook, Lena Bricker, who supposedly fell down the stairs holding curry in one hand and ketchup in the other, so the two flavors were randomly mixed. However, it seems that Lena Bricker was a product of fiction and not a real person.

However, Prince Alexander of Schauburg Lippe, from the district of Hanover, also claims the “paternity” of the curry sausage. He claims that the recipe was invented in his palace in 1946 by a cook, to the delight of officers from Great Britain, who frequented his kitchen at the time.

…and the biggest curry sausage

At least three cities therefore argue about the origin of this special delicacy. We may not be entirely sure when the first sausage of its kind appeared, but we do know when the largest appeared.

April 30, 2010 was in the diary when a kitchen furniture company in the city of Wolfenbüttel unveiled a giant sausage 320 meters long and weighing 175.2 kilograms, accompanied by 95 kilograms of sauce. In this way the company secured, if nothing else, an entry in the Guinness Book.

Edited by: Yiannis Papadimitriou