Frankfurter Würstel (Viennese Sausage Pair)

The first thing you need to know about the Frankfurter Würstel is the name. The rest of the world calls this sausage a Wiener. The Viennese call it a Frankfurter. The people of Frankfurt call it a Wiener. Nobody agrees and nobody is backing down. Gretel always said this was the most Viennese argument imaginable: two cities fighting over a sausage for two hundred years and both of them absolutely certain they're right.

I grew up eating these on every trip to Austria with Gretel and my grandmother Eva. We'd arrive in Vienna, drop the bags at the hotel, and walk straight to a Würstelstand. It was always the first meal. Two Frankfurter on a paper plate, a Semmel torn open, a smear of süßer Senf, and a small hill of freshly grated Kren that hit the back of your nose before you'd even tasted it. Gretel would stand at the counter with her coat still buttoned and eat with her fingers, and I thought that was the most glamorous thing in the world.

The technique here is almost nothing, and that's the point. You heat water to about 75 degrees Celsius, just hot enough that you wouldn't want to put your hand in it, and you hold the sausages there for ten to twelve minutes. You never let the water boil. Boiling splits the casing, forces the juices out, and turns a good sausage into a sad, waterlogged tube.The Viennese word for this gentle holding is "ziehen lassen," letting them draw. The sausage warms through slowly, the casing stays taut, and when you bite into it you get that clean snap followed by a rush of seasoned, smoky pork. That snap is everything. If there's no snap, something went wrong.

This is the simplest recipe I'll ever give you. It's also one of the most important. The Würstelstand is Vienna's great equalizer: opera singers, taxi drivers, politicians, and tourists all standing at the same counter eating the same sausage at two in the morning. Good Austrian home cooking doesn't always mean hours in the kitchen. Sometimes it means knowing how to heat a sausage properly and having the sense to serve it with the right things alongside.