Vienna Sausage

The Vienna sausage is one of those foods brought to America by immigrants and then naturalized into an iconic item. Hailing from German-speaking Europe, it has several incarnations. One is the wiener, from Wienerwurst, or “Vienna sausage” (from Wien, the German spelling of Vienna), originally made mainly from pork and appearing in bundles of links. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, the name “wiener” came to be used interchangeably with “hot dog” and sometimes “frankfurter,” a different formulation of beef and pork. Properly speaking, the Vienna or Vienna-style sausage is a linked sausage, often with a frankfurter-style mixture of meats. It was sold in braided links, but in America it transformed into something else: canned sausage. In this form it became an early example of convenience food.