It’s all in the Headdress – Clues to an Old Goetta Recipe

 

The wedding photo of Harry Kleine and Mary Espel at St. John’s Dry Ridge, and a woman wearing the Kranzmaikes wedding crown of Hanover.

As part of the Big Goetta Project, I’ve been interviewing our local butchers to learn about the origin of their recipes. I had a great phone conversation recently with Dick Stehlin, of Stehlin’s Meats about their goetta. I learned that his grandfather, the founder, was of Alsatian origin. John “Butch” Stehlin started his meat business in 1913 in the area of Bevis, around the German Catholic farming community centered around St. John the Baptist on Dry Ridge Road. The business now is in operation by his great grandsons.
So I asked Dick where his grandfather got the recipe. His reply was similar to what I’d heard from other family butchers. It was just an old German recipe that he got and modified. But I’m a food etymologist! I want to dig deeper to trace it to the village it came from and understand why its an all pork version, or one with a particularly different spice blend and related it to the culture of that village.

A Hanoverian wedding party 1903, with women wearing the traditional headdress.
Alsace Lorraine does have a food legacy of sausages, particularly a blood sausage, called either Boudin Noir or bluetwurscht, but not of gruetzwurst or grain sausages like goetta. And Stehlin’s is the only meat market left in Cincinnati that makes our regional blood sausage – Johnny-in-the-bag. So I wondered, where would an Alsatian have learned to make goetta?

Stehlin’s Goetta.
This highlights one of the facts about Cincinnati and our German heritage. Ours is a melting pot of Germanic ancestries. Unlike smaller communities like say Minster, Ohio, where the German immigrants came from one specific area of villages in Germany, Cincinnati Germans clustered around Germans from many areas of Germany. Alsatians lived next to Bavarians, Saxonians or even Mecklenburgers. And so, it makes it tough to trace origins of German recipes to specific cities.
So, I was thumbing around the history blog of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church to see if I could drum up any more clues on the Stehlin family. And what I found was pretty amazing. The church website has a history blog commemorating their 150th anniversary celebration. One of the blogs was of early church members. A parishioner had posted a few very old wedding photos from his family. I saw one photograph of Harry Kleine and Mary Espel taken around 1900. They were both young and good looking and dressed in their finest wedding clothes.
I remembered that William Espel was the livestock farmer who John Stehlin bought the animals that he drove down to the stockyards in Camp Washington. Through census records I verified that Mary Espel was William’s daughter. Ok so what did his daughter have to do with a goetta recipe.
Well, in the wedding photo, I noticed that Mary’s wedding headdress and high collar looked very much like the traditional Vegas-showgirl wedding headdresses called kranzmaikes, specific to the Hanover and Lower Saxony regions of Germany. Even the non-wedding headware of the women of Hanover is pretty over the top-showgirl. It did one thing for sure- focused Hanoverian men’s glances on the face. Bavarian women and their busty dirndls encouraged their men to focus a bit lower. Both Hanover and Lower Saxony are home to the cradle of goetta – where the majority of our region’s first goetta producers came.
So this clue encouraged me to go back further in census records. I was able to verify that farmer Will Espel had come to Colerain Township from the Kingdom of Hanover. He would have been very familiar with goetta and the native gruetzwursts of Hanover. John Stehlin butchered his first group of livestock in Espel’s barn off Colerain Avenue. So, he probably learned how to make goetta from Herr Espel in that old barn. It would certainly make sense how an Alsatian would learn how to make an Hanoverian dish.
And this type of recipe sharing happened all over Greater Cincinnati with butchers and bakers as Germanic immigrants from different regions blended together in German speaking neighborhoods. And this is the reason why each goetta recipe from the multi-generational butcheries are a bit different. While they all embraced the gruetzwurst tradition of Hanover, they each added their own special flare native to their region.

 

I wonder if Harry and Mary had goetta at their wedding reception!