I have not eaten a Vienna Sausage since the age of ten, though I remember it as having a delightfully porous and water-soaked texture. Unlike a hot-dog, which had to be eaten in sections, and generally inside of a bun, the Vienna Sausage appealed to one's impulsive streak; you just popped one in your mouth and ate it whole.

Even at the time, however, I was repelled by the gelatinous substance which caked a multi-sausage bundle together. After opening a small can, I'd take this bundle to the kitchen faucet immediately and run hot water over it so as to dispel and disengage the offending gelatin. I would not, in fact, begin to eat until the sausages were a hundred percent gelatin-free. I was a fussy little kid, no doubt.

If you'e a thinking person, the question of what's in a hot dog or sausage arises, with inevitably disconcerting results. Uncouth speculations run into private parts and unspeakable orifices. I remember being drunk with somebody with an obscenely inventive mind and having a wild old time with forbidden anatomies and freakish emissions. When my fellow drunk proposed an unforgettably gruesome possibility I will not repeat here - or anywhere - we found ourselves rolling around on the floor as pigs never would. If anything, our little colloquy proved the innate superiority of animals. But that's another story.

This question of content cannot be settled here; nor perhaps will it ever - until some factory worker steps forward with a tale to tell.

The question of origin, however, seems even murkier - but perhaps easier (at least in the short run) to unravel.

I wish to deal with it now because I will presently travel to the eponymous city and will want to be able to grapple with this question with some degree of rigor, within a sort of logical framework no reasonable person might reject - at least not until he or she gets home and thinks about it. It does no good to come to a place half-cocked, with half-baked ideas and hand-held assumptions - even if I'm not quite sure what these are. I would also like to clinch an historic enigma that has defied elucidation for so many years.

My feeling is that the Vienna Sausage is not Viennese at all, but a provincial wannabe that seeped into the somewhat tuberous cuisine of that city over a long period of time while seeming to just "show up"
overnight. For me, the Vienna Sausage is as permanent a thing as Jericho, the Rock of Gilbraltar, Superman.
It is as impossible to displace it in my imagination as any of these other things; it is, in effect, a cultural icon whose reach and influence one can only begin to guess at.

Yet for being so well-established on the world's stage, the Vienna Sausage is a tiny thing, and easily overshadowed by the parade of great wursts that are a staple of German cuisine, and perhaps the reason the place lost its stride over the years. A city with hardened arteries is a city that not only sleeps, but dies in its bed. Perhaps the Viennna Sausage was developed as a sort of dainty alternative to a sausage-proud diet, a bite-sized bastard of the sausage trade with long-life-inducing intentions.
That is also why it may have been seen as export-worthy, whereas your more overstuffed fare has stayed in the deli. Americans have for the most part embraced the smallish Vienna Sausage while rejecting the more powerful and penile bratwurst. You'll see a bratwurst now and then, but you can't buy it in the can.

Of course, the Viennese are an elegant people who love pastry dishes more than anybody else in the world.
They love to dawdle over coffee and cigarettes in a way Americans would find distastefully indulgent.
They love the good things in life undisguisedly, though they try not to be ostentatious about it. It is, then, possible that the Vienna Sausage was developed as an appetizer that would tease the palate and set the stage for the more imposing and heavy-tasting stuffs to come. Perhaps the Vienna Sausage is a proud city's hedge against grossness.
This seems pscyhologically appropriate. The Viennese are a subtle, even withdrawn, sort of people who might, in their heart of hearts, be repulsed at the thought of a stogie-sized wurst, seething with the heat of the kitchen, and dripping literally with a pig's eyes, ears, mouth and God knows what else.
Perhaps it is a concession to a kind of tribal guilt everyone in Vienna must feel at the slaughter of innocents - which it maligns by trotting them out every night in the guise of a meal! Freud must have examined this subject, albeit privately; he must have rightly considered it too daring for the time.

Yet these are idle speculations. Is it not possible to get to the physical origin of the Vienna Sausage without doing a shit-load, as one might say, of research and relying, as I must, on prejudice, hearsay, and intellectual caprice? I should say it IS possible and I'm going to prove it here and now!

My theory is that the Vienna Sausage was indeed co-opted by the Viennese whose anti-Semitism forced them, after expelling the Jews umpteen times, to call them back because, frankly, the Jews made everything better except for the Catholics and Protestants who were maddened by their intellectual and technical superiority. I would posit that it was a Jew who invented the so-called "Vienna Sausage", bringing it to the city in a small cart or wagon, and selling it on the street to wealthy burgers who'd missed their wurst that day, or just needed a little snack to tide them over. I would posit that it was Jew who slaved over the recipe in some little-bitty town, with one synagogue and the most rudimentary supply of pig-meat which this industrious fellow, using not just the might but ingenuity of His People, extended it with other parts as yet unknown to create a sort of teensy hybrid that was neither flesh or fish - nor even a sausage exactly, but bearing such a family resemblance that its inventor was forced to denominate it accordingly. Perhaps he never wanted it to be a sausage at all and was interested in a cuisine that would not just feed a bunch of big-city people who might think about shedding a few pounds, but provide sustenance to his own village. Perhaps it got to the city by accident and was adopted by a population whose proclivity for the dynamic shapeliness of the wannabe sausage rationalized a compulsion that dare not speak its name. That is to say, because the Vienna Sausage was small, it was also acceptable. You could accuse no hungry Viennese of grossness if you caught him with a plateful of these savories.

And so it is eminently possible that the so-called "Vienna Sausage" belongs to the Austrian People at large and ought to be seen as such. Furthermore, if a Jewish man or woman is likely to have invented it, I think it's high time that a guilt-ridden Europe aired out this dirty secret and hand the invention back to its rightful owner. It's high time some sort of reparation was made. YOU wouldn't want to be satisfying your hunger with a thing misappropriated and misnamed. I think a gluttonous and uncaring world must be made to face this ignominy head-on after so many centuries of partisan noshing. Speeches and monuments are well and good, but when does penance ever have repercussions, as it were, at the dinner table? It is high time this internationally significant food-item be restored to its rightful station and be honored for the thing it is, rather
than the thing "people want it to be."

I propose then that the "Vienna Sausage" be re-named.
One international referendum would do it. And, if
not, it's a damned good start.