We always enjoy when our interests come together in a cool way. We are both interested in history, including military history and (obviously) family history. Both of us love cooking and experimenting with food. We also like to camp. So when we found a couple of videos about Erbswurst, we had to go down that rabbit hole!
What the heck is erbswurst?
Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Erbswurst-1.jpg
Picture by: Rainer Zenz https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Rainer_Zenz
Licenses under the Create Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/deed.en
Erbswurst is a German food item. Its name would translate literally to “pea sausage”. But it’s really only packaged like a sausage. What’s inside is a bunch of compressed tablets of pea flour, bacon, fat, onion, salt and spices. Crush up a tablet into a pot of water and boil it for a few minutes to make pea soup. It might be considered one of the first instant soups. It was invented in Berlin in 1867 by Johann Heinrich Grüneberg. He was a cook and food processor.
The Prussian Army bought the rights to produce it, set up a factory, and made it a part of the standard issue of rations to the troops. Each soldier carried some erbswurst and some hardtack or rye crisps. These items wouldn’t spoil, and were handy whenever a soldier was hungry. Even 150+ years later, the same items would be pretty handy for a hiker, too!
The Knorr company bought the rights to produce it in 1889, and they continued to make it until 2018. Unfortunately, they have discontinued it, and nobody makes it anymore. Knorr does still sell an instant pea soup, but it contains no bacon or fat, and comes in an envelope.
How is it part of our family history?
Gerhard Wellman, Walt’s great-grandfather, probably ate this while he was serving in the Prussian army in 1878-1879. I wrote a post about his discharge papers here. We don’t know for sure that he ate it, of course. But just as there aren’t many current US Army troops who haven’t eaten an MRE, it’s hard to imagine that Gerhard wouldn’t have had the standard field ration of the time.
Stay tuned!
So, this stuff would make a great camping food, is part of our family history, but isn’t available for purchase. If you’ve been reading this blog for long, or if you know either of us in real life, you know where this is going. Stay tuned as we try to make our own version of Erbswurst!
Digging deeper
One of our favorite YouTube channels is InRangeTV. They cover a lot of historical topics along with some pretty thoughtful firearms content. This video was the first time we heard about Erbswurst, and it piqued our interest.
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