Entertaining read, thanks for the link!
Yes, NJ. I’ll def do more reading up! Appreciate the link. There is a very popular German club in Clark, NJ that hosts wonderful events. The food is excellent.
Liverwurst hard to find? Seriously? Even the white bread grocery stores stock it around here. Pillers and Brandt are the most common brands available.
I’ve never purchased it. Didn’t know where to start actually. What little I knew never appealed to me. Turns out I didn’t know much about liverwurst. And- Coupled with the recent Boar’s Head recall traced to illness their brand of liverwurst, the topic has my attention.
Love it. Thick slices, red onion, whole grain mustard on rye bread.
AFAIK, Schaller & Weber is still in SOME supermarkets, and has online ordering. It’s spreadable. What was their liverwurst in any Long Island deli in the 1950’s had a natural fat-lined casing. Today, it is still 8 ounces but called their gold medal liver paté and has a gold plastic casing. You can freeze it unopened. They have several varieties but IMO, this original one is still the best. It is VERY rich. I spread it thinly and get 6-8 sandwiches from 8oz. If you come upon Karl Ehmer brand, that’s almost as good.
My Wegmans stopped carrying S&W since the pandemic but has another brand - can’t recall the name, that is good if I don’t focus too much.
My favorites are 1) on a pumpernickel everything bagel with a little chive cream cheese, raw onion, sliced hard-cooked egg, grainy mustard. No pickle because it makes the fat coat your palate and esophagus and you may think about what it’s doing to your aorta!, and B) on toast - pumpernickel or rye - with honey mustard and raw or grilled onion. Egg optional.
ETA: Aha! The NYT article links to S&W. I’ll have to order some sundry wursts. Last time Wegmans had the Gold Medal wurst it was $5. So $8 is not bad considering post-pandemic price increases all over, and how far the stuff stretches. Really, if presented with a bucket of it, more than 1-1.5 oz as a portion would be unappealing.
Not sure where you live but try finding a German butcher who is doing their own cold cuts etc. to get good quality liverwurst. All the brands I tried here in the US are very mild tasting and are missing the liver taste. If you don’t have such a butcher the Schaller & Weber ones are the best option.
Thank you, everyone. Super helpful.
This sounds excellent.
I’m going to ask my Aunt. Not sure she will know but she probably has a pal who might.
Sometimes just searching through Yelp turns up interesting places
There’s a German deli in Lemoyne, PA where there is a wide selection of liverwursts; I had never seen more than one option before around here, so I was overwhelmed! I wound up buying small slices of four or five different styles to bring home to Mom last summer.
Braunshweiger is very popular where I live. It’s still consumed regularly. My dad loved it with peanut butter. Blech. It was a typical sandwich-type meat growing up. Loved it.
I like smooth over coarse.
Deli meat was not a thing in my culture growing up, and so liverwurst most certainly wasn’t. These were all things we brought home from school, and made a childhood treat because this is what all the other American kids ate in school. Somewhere in those early years, my oldest sister picked up liverwurst. So naturally that was something she brought home from the store one day, and once I tried it, I thought it was delicious! Yes, it is like cheap pate on bread, but it was undeniably tasty. I haven’t had liverwurst in probably 25-30 years, and now I want a liverwurst sandwich.
With Peanut Butter
Usinger’s I imagine?
I’ve also seen S&W products in certain stores here in the Bay Area. My wife is a fan of their various liver spreads.
while in high school, did a two week Appalachian Trail hike - where everything needed was backpacked , , , to the tune of many pounds…
post Chrome Dome , , , at the end point, rambled on down to a small ‘village’ with a country store.
while waiting for our ‘pick up’ - wandered in and snatched rye crisp, raw onion and liverwurst. sat on the stoop and gorged - a spread of liverwurst on the rye crisp, punctuated with munches of raw onion . . .
. . . seldom had such a lux enjoyment since…
fast forward decades . . . living in Germany - every little town had 2-3 butchers all with their own versions of [any wurst you can think of]
(business trips) visiting school classmates - Saturday shopping entailed multiple bakeries (one for best toast bread, one for best belaegtes brot, one for the best broetchen…) and multiple Metzger/butcher/meat/wurst shops (for the best… x z y ). . . .
sigh . . . USA lacks that kind of variety. just tripped over a “real” German deli - which plainly states on their web site . . . “call before you come to be sure we’re open”
oh . . . .
Oscar Meyer stuff is the same in every store north-south-east-west . . .
I like their blood sausage
Usinger’s was the got-to for Milwaukeeans no longer living in brew town. Most of our neighborhoods had our own butchers. Dick’s Finer Foods, Sout Mwaukee, was ours. (Dick was my cousin… no pressure.)
Hopefully Dick was a good one!