What is it about Germans and sausage? They like nothing better than grilling bangers on a barbecue and drinking beer. It has to be Bratwurst of course – those are the plump pork-and-beef sausages from Thuringia. Add a bread roll, a dollop of potato salad and industrial quantities of mild yellow mustard (which must be from Bautzen). And that’s it.
Usually it’s the men who light the charcoal and turn the sausages on the grill, with the tongs in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. The women are in the kitchen, peeling potatoes. And usually it’s a warm summer evening on the allotment (Kleingarten) or in the backyard (Hinterhof). It’s quintessentially German, in the same way that cricket teas and village fetes are so very English.
So the recent city centre grillfest in Leipzig’s market square was an extraordinary, baffling event. Why would hundreds of people choose to spend eight hours outdoors on their feet in freezing fog, grilling against the clock? The clue is in the costumes.
There are grill teams dressed up as kings, vikings, witches, fairies, bees, butterflies, American NFL footballers. even giant prawns. This is because many of the team members also belong to Carnival (Karneval) clubs.
Karneval is known as Fasching here in formerly atheist-communist eastern Germany. It’s celebrated on Shrove Monday, two days before Ash Wednesday.
But Fasching has little to do with religion. It’s a great big street party with processions of floats, costumed dancers and musicians.
So the winter grilling contest is a sort of prequel to Fasching. It brings the teams together after the Christmas and New Year holidays, raises funds, and everyone loves it. They cram into the Grill Your Own Sausage enclosure, knocking back bottled beer from the festival sponsor, Ur-Krostitzer brewery.
Some daredevils try their skills on the beer rodeo – a bouncy castle for grown-ups with a giant inflatable beer bottle in the middle. The player straddles the bottle. The operator presses the button. And immediately the bouncy bottle bucks and twists like a bronco, throwing the player on to the inflatable bed. For most, once is enough.
There’s another giant inflatable beer bottle and this one has a name – Uri. He waddles on to the stage to present each winning team with merch advertising the brewery, from bathrobes to baseball caps. To win a prize, a finished grilled sausage must pass four vigorous tests. How does it look? Is it cooked through, but not burned? How does it feel in the mouth? And how does it taste?
To make it a fair contest, there is a standard-issue sausage for all grill-teams, supplied by the co-sponsor, Wolf. And they each get a standard-issue small portable barbecue and cooking utensils.
What’s more important, in these days of “Veganuary”, it’s not all sausage. The tournament now allows teams to bring their own ingredients and concoct a “non-sausage alternative grilled item”.
The winners in this category were a team of witches. They scored top points with their grillable pie containing a mix of gorgonzola cheese, roasted walnuts and a drizzle of honey. A runner-up dished out grilled pineapple with lime and chilli.
Less exotic was the musical accompaniment – an Elvis impersonator and a young woman belting out Helene Fischer songs. But the crowds loved them, deftly holding on to their beer bottles as they danced and sang along.
For 15 years the annual winter grilling festival has followed this formula. But then Germans appreciate predictability. One of their favourite films for New Year’s Eve is the English cult classic Dinner for One, with its immortal catchphrase, often quoted whenever a group of Germans are planning an annual event…
“The same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?” asks the butler. “Of course, James,” replies Miss Sophie, “The same procedure as every year.”
Jane Whyatt is a journalist, newsreader and independent TV producer
