Grilled Brats (©photo by Calgrin, courtesy of morgueFile.com)

In exciting news from Reuters, a German historian has uncovered the world's oldest known recipe for bratwurst while doing research in an archive in the town of Weimar. Dated 1432, it is nearly 600 years old.

The bratwursts were made of beef and pork. According to the guidelines, sausage makers had to use only the purest, unspoiled meat. Not doing so meant facing a fine of 24 pfennigs, which was the equivalent of a day's wages. In Medieval Germany town markets had committees set up to act as quality control monitors.

Some believe Brat comes from an Old High German word (spoken between the 9th and 11th centuries) that means meat without waste. Wurst means sausage and probably comes from the word "wirren" that originally meant mixture.

When you cook sausage you are performing one of the oldest cooking techniques. The first recorded cookbook "Apicus Cookery" from approximately 228 A.D. has sausage recipes in it. Apicus lived in Rome. But who knows when and where this technique began.

The Reuters article quotes Historian Hubert Erzmann, 75, as saying, "The discovery shows that there were already consumer protection laws in the Middle Ages."

To read the Reuters article cited above go to: Historian finds oldest recipe for bratwurst

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