The Woman Who Invented Currywurst

A snack stand in Charlottenburg

The generally accepted origin story places the invention on 4 September 1949, at a stand on the corner of Kantstrasse and Kaiser-Friedrich-Strasse in Berlin, run by a woman named Herta Heuwer. Berlin was still largely rubble. Rationing was in force. What Heuwer had was access, through British soldiers, to ketchup, Worcestershire sauce and curry powder.

She combined them, poured the result over a sliced pork sausage, and sold it to construction workers rebuilding the city. She later patented the sauce under the name Chillup. At its peak her stand is said to have sold thousands of portions a week.

Why it caught

Currywurst is cheap, hot, eaten standing up and finished in ninety seconds. It arrived precisely when a city needed food that fitted around a working day rather than the other way round. It spread from Berlin to the Ruhr, where it became the canonical shift-end meal outside the steelworks — and where the sausage is more often served with the skin on, a distinction Berliners and Ruhr locals will argue about at length.

The details that matter

The sauce should be sweet, but not dessert-sweet, and it needs acidity behind it. The curry powder goes on after the sauce, dusted heavily, so you get raw spice aroma rather than cooked-in spice. And it is served with a small wooden fork, in a paper tray, with chips on the side.

Germany eats an estimated 800 million portions a year. Berlin had a museum devoted to it. It is, by some distance, the country's most successful piece of improvised cooking.

Ours

We make the sauce in-house — tomato, curry, a whisper of vinegar — and we dust the powder on at the pass, not in the pot. Order it sliced, in the tray, the way it is meant to arrive.