Saturday, August 14, 2010
People The Grave of the Vienna Sausage King
Posted by Vance Lauderdale on Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 11:10 PM
On July 19th, the anniversary of Wortham's birth, his devoted fans (mostly former Boy Scouts) leave empty cans of the delicious concoction at his gravesite.
Why he is buried here is a mystery, since he was born in Vienna, Austria (as you might expect), traveled to America in the early 1900s to work in a tin-can factory outside Baltimore, and then spent the rest of his life in Vienna, Virginia (where it is pronounced, as many do the sausage, Vi-EEN-a).
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According to "The Oxford companion to American food and drink" by Andrew F. Smith ... "commercial canning of sausage had appeared by the mid-nineteenth century. The term 'Vienna' or 'Vienna-style' seems to appeared around 1903".
A company that made canned sausage that was located close to Memphis is the Bryan Packing Company (now known as Bryan Foods Inc.) at West Point, Mississippi. They began packing vienna sausages in oil back in 1938. But Smith doesn't say why Archibald K. Wortham was buried in Memphis when he "kicked the can."
Some credit Johann Georg Lahner (1772 � 1845) for making the original "vienna sausage" (but not the canned ones). There's a plaque in Vienna at Lahner's last place of buisness that reads "....here the butcher family Lahner produced from 1832 to 1967 the sausages known only in Vienna as Frankfurter sausages but in the whole world as Viennese sausages�.
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Is this real or are we having our sausages yanked? If real I will need to make a pligramage....
My father always pronounced them Vy-any. I was never a boy scout (me and Captain Kirk), but they were standard rations for fishing trips.
I was just making a joke. I thought this particular style of gravestone (which can be found in other cemeteries around the county) looked like a Vienna sausage. Maybe I was just hungry that day.
When I take my sons fishing, we bring along a bottle of bacon-infused vodka. Add a can of aerosolized cheese and you've got a picnic. Not to mention a cocktail like no other.
Oh come ON, citizens. Oscar Mayer (oops, I goofed earlier) only gets a small plaque and a modest marker? Surely a national hero (?) deserves at least a 20-foot weiner-shaped column? Shame shame shame:
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?p…
