For 4 people you will need: 1 kg of firm boiling potatoes; 2 shallots, 1/8 l meat stock. Walnut oil, wine vinegar, salt, black pepper, 1 bunch of chives.
Brush the potatoes and cook them in salted water with a pinch of caraway seeds. Meanwhile, heat the meat stock and salt it, peel the shallots and cut them into small cubes. Drain the potatoes, let them cool down a bit, peel them and cut them into slices of about 3 mm thickness. Put them straight into the hot meat stock, which the potato slices will soak up a lot of. This way they not only take on flavour, but also require less oil. Stir again and again and add vinegar little by little. Finally, add the diced shallots and season with freshly ground black pepper and salt. Finish the salad with the walnut oil. Last but not least, add the chives in the form of fine rolls. Cover, do not refrigerate; stir again and again, taste and season.
So much for the basic recipe, which can be varied in many ways. For example, instead of oil, dress the salad with the rendered fat of diced beef jerky (and the jerky itself). Chopped shallots can also be sautéed in the fat. What about pieces of gherkins or capers? UnGerman, but delicious: garlic! Either way, and again, never refrigerate the salad!
Bindswurst, Bouillon, Wasserweck: The Frankfurt menu for every day
While "Frankfurter sausages" are known worldwide and, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries, are highly appreciated, the beef sausage has hardly made it beyond the Rhine-Main area. Already in nearby Lower Franconia, the Weißwurst easily outranks it.
The biography of the latter is known to the day; almost nothing is known, however, about the origin of the Rindswurst. Sometime at the beginning of the 19th century, thus much later than Frankfurter sausages, the beef sausage tentatively appears on the scene.
Until Karl Gref took it on. Born in Meerholz near Gelnhausen, he married the grocer's daughter Minna Völsing and opened a butcher's shop in 1894 in one of the alleys of Frankfurt's sunken old town. Kosher sausages, as preferred by the Jewish population, may have given him the idea: Namely, to produce cooked sausage from pure beef, without the slightest trace of pork or pork fat.
This is how the chronicle of the leading house, the butchery Gref-Völsing, located on Hanauer Landstraße since 1913, reports it. And still today one sticks to beef purely, although a portion of up to 10% pork would be permitted. Made exclusively from beef, smoked and pre-broiled so that they only need to be heated for consumption, the famous Gref-Völsing beef sausages have enjoyed great popularity for over 100 years. The secret of their success lies in the careful use of spices (a little garlic, pepper, nutmeg, curry, allspice, salt) and in the quality of the meat from bulls that come from Franconia or Upper Hesse.
Dorothea Wohlberg, one of the two managing directors of the family business together with her sister Friederike Satvary, is convinced that great-grandfather Karl Gref would have had what it takes to make the beef sausage famous beyond the region. But he was not granted this, and so the plump red sausage never really stood up to the Frankfurt sausages. The Fleischwurst, however, made the beef sausage quite lovers away.
It is fresh every day, from 7 o'clock in the morning. The beef sausages (9,20 €/kg), recognizable by the typical blue clip, are available in many grocery stores, at water huts and in the Hanauer Landstraße, of course. For example, as part of the "Menüs": sausage, Wasserweck and bouillon for about 2.00 €. Another strength of the house are genuine Frankfurter sausages (the pair for 1.30 €). For this, the lean shoulder meat of exclusively Hessian pigs is processed. Sodann: Not only the sisters are on the meat sausage of the house.
Good tastes to the beef sausage (as well as to Frankfurter sausages) a hearty potato salad. Prepared the southern German way, that is, without mayonnaise, and never let it stand cold!
Butchery Gref-Völsing
Friederike Satvary and Dorothea Wohlberg
Hanauer Landstr. 132
60314 Frankfurt am Main
Phone: 069 / 433530
Fax: 494156
Opening hours: Mon 7am-4pm, Tue-Fri 7am-6pm, Sat 7am-1pm
from Waldemar Thomas