Käsekrainer

What it is

The Käsekrainer is a smoked sausage of pork with pieces of cheese worked into the forcemeat, so that the cheese runs when it is heated. It is the definitive item at a Viennese Würstelstand, the street sausage stand that lines the city's pavements and parks. The name means cheese Krainer, after Krain — Carniola, now part of Slovenia — whose own smoked sausage is the ancestor and today carries a protected designation of its own. The cheese version is Austrian and recent: it was developed in Upper Austria in the late 1960s and has long since overtaken the plain one at the stands.

It is sold already cooked and lightly smoked, so the stand only has to heat it. Split lengthwise and put on the grill, the casing crisps and the cheese comes up through the cut. It is eaten standing, off a paper tray, in about four minutes.

The slang of the stand

The stands have their own vocabulary, and the Käsekrainer has the best-known word in it. Viennese slang calls it an Eitrige — roughly, the suppurating one — for the way the cheese runs out of the split. It is crude but affectionate, and it is one of the most quoted pieces of Viennese sausage-stand slang.

A sliced gherkin, sometimes with a chilli and ketchup, is a Krokodü, a crocodile. Some of these terms are as much a joke for visitors as working vocabulary; ordering an Eitrige mit an Krokodü is a small performance and the stand will play along; ordering in plain German gets exactly the same sausage.

How it is eaten

Lunch, or at two in the morning on the way home, and rarely anything in between. It comes split in a paper boat with a dab of mustard — sweet, süß, or hot, scharf, and the stand will ask which — a Semmel or a thick end of bread, and pickled peppers or a gherkin. The peppers are there to cut the fat, which they do.

The drink is a Märzen, the maltier Viennese lager, drunk from the can or bottle at the counter. The whole thing is built to be held in two hands while standing up, with no table involved.

Curious facts

• The name means "cheese krainer". The word Käsekrainer is a direct translation of the sausage's main feature, combining the German word for cheese with the regional name of its ancestor.
• The slang is affectionate. Eitrige sounds unprintable, but no one at the counter means it as criticism.
• The cheese melts when heated. The sausage is sold pre-cooked, but the cheese inside only becomes soft and runny when the casing is split and the sausage is reheated on the grill.
• It is the stand favourite. At many Viennese stands it is ordered at least as often as the Frankfurter, the Bratwurst or the Debreziner beside it.
• The cheese version is modern. While the original Krainer is documented in the 19th century, the cheese-filled variant was created in Upper Austria in the late 1960s.

Where to try it

At a Würstelstand, which needs no address: they stand on street corners, by markets and outside stations across Vienna, most of them open from the morning until well after midnight. There is no table and no booking. The one that is busy at an odd hour is the one to join.

A stand is also one of the few places in the city where a taxi driver, an office worker and someone on the way home from the opera stand at the same counter, which is most of why the Viennese defend them.