Gary Schoening: Transcript

Glenwood, community mettwurst (sausage) making
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It seems like every family made the mettwurst. Every family had their own recipe. Some families kept their recipes kind of a tight secret, wouldn't tell anybody what was in it. Every one is a little different.

My name is Gary Schoening, and I was born and raised in a farmhouse two and a half miles south of Mineola, Iowa.

The unique thing about mettwurst is the way it is made and cold-smoked. It is raw pork that has been smoked lightly. I don't think that will sell very well in America. It didn't sell very well with four Americans that ended up eating it after they found out that it was raw, even in Germany. But that we found that out after we had eaten it, though, however, and we are all four still living. It was a little different than what ours is over here. The true mettwurst is made with trichinosis-free pork.

Now, we have Americanized that just a little bit inasmuch as we do cook our mettwurst after we have smoked it. Some use a little sage, the different secret spices that Colonel Sanders only knows. The Colonel doesn't even know about these 'cause the Colonel wasn't German.

We bought our pork in boxes. Now, there's some other families in the area that butchered their own hogs later.

Everybody had their own job. Dad, of course, was the seasoning master. Garrett and myself and my brother-in-law—we were the de-boners. We got stuck cutting the doggone thing off the bone. That was, I thought, the worst job, second-to-worst job. Then we had the sausage stuffer, the ones that would stuff the—we had a grinder and a mixer. Anyhow, one person would have that job and then somebody would have to stand and allow the casing to come out just right. Of course, that was my mother's job. Then after that, then, somebody would have to tie the ends of the casings, and that was actually the worst job, because after you've tied about 400 of these, the strings just start cutting into your fingers. And in my opinion, tying the strings was the worst job of the whole project.

I'll never forget about talking of a family project, once when my daughters—my oldest daughter would have been about eight or nine and my youngest one would have been four—my mother happened to be not feeling well the day we decided to make mettwurst. So she was really concerned who was going to take over her job down there—letting the casings come off the end of the grinder. And my oldest daughter had the job to begin with, and then my youngest daughter, she wanted to try it. Didn't think they were going to be able to do it either, but after a couple tries, got it down pretty good. Poor old Mom stuck her head down in the basement and around the corner to see how we were doing. And I think it just crushed her to see my four-year-old daughter doing a job that she thought only she could do.

But, no, it was a family gathering and family time. My niece had wanted to come back. She's a doctor in San Diego now, but while she was in med school at the University of Iowa, she had wanted to have a sausage-making session, and got everything lined up and had a session down at the bakery. And I'll be doggone, every little thing that we had ever changed, she picked up on. "Oh, that's not the way Grandpa used to do it. That's not the way Grandpa used to do it!" Because she probably hadn't done it for ten years, but she knew how it was done from way—what she had watched.

The church had its 100th centennial in '82. That first year we made 300, 400 pounds of it, maybe. We decided that we should make it an annual affair. This past year I think we made a little over 1200 pounds of sausage to celebrate our heritage.