There are about 40 people out here at the high point, but with a constant stream working the three sausage stuffers, and people regularly packing up their coolers with the sausage they’ve just made to take it home, I can believe it’ll pass the 100 guests Dan anticipates by the time the evening is over. The women go straight inside, the men head for the garage, often plopping a bottle of bourbon on a table or passing around whatever new brew they arrived with. A steady stream of new arrivals comes up the driveway, often the husband dragging a cooler while his wife carries a baby in a car seat. I SNAP SOME SHOTS OF SAUSAGE-STUFFING, but it’s crowded in the garage, between all the guys and all the pork, and I wind up hanging out with one of my sons in the backyard, in the crosswind of a fire pit, the grills being fired up, and a few guys smoking cigars (at 11 am). He said it was perfect, and he passed away in May.” “He was picky about it, even though he was happy we were doing it. “Last year was the first year I made it that my grandfather said it was perfect,” Dan says. I figure that’s fair, you go to a grocery store, you’ve got hot or mild.” The only thing you can change is level of heat, because some people like it hotter. Because the first year, a few people said, I’m gonna bring garlic, I’m gonna bring this or that… no. “It was my grandfather’s recipe that’s the recipe. “The one rule I’ve had at this is that I don’t let people change the recipe,” he says. When I picked it up, he said he used to make sausage with his dad-he was born in the butcher shop, he said.” The day we made it, he took me in the back, let me oversee the grinding and the seasoning. “Kurt Schmeisser, the guy who owns it-he gets it. I told him the story, and as I got him more involved, he was so happy to be part of the tradition. 1300 pounds of pork-just fitting it in my car is getting to be an issue,” he says. “Logistically, it’s getting to be a problem. Along the way one of the things to go would be the cutting and grinding-now he buys the pork already ground from Schmeisser’s, an old German butcher on Milwaukee Avenue in Niles. The records going back to the early years are taped to the fridge in the garage and show the event’s steady growth-a dozen friends and 133 pounds around 2010 would become 800 pounds by 2015 and the nearly 1300 pounds of ground pork that three neatly spaced rows of friends had pre-purchased and would be making sausage out of that day. Records of how Sausage Fest has grown-from 251 pounds in 2012 to 1,267 this year. “Later in life as I got married, Megan and I would make it at my house, and then my friends would ask for it, when was I going to make it?” “He’d make sauce out of anything-sauce out of crab legs, sauce out of snails, in the old days I think they made sauce out of sparrows.”ĭante never made a big party out of making sausage, but he’d do it with the whole family, a dozen or so working on making the sausage and cooking afterwards. “We always liked that, it was something that was always around in our family, and when I was old enough to make it, I learned to make it with him,” Dan says. It wasn’t a foodie thing-it was the Depression and it was what you did to have food.” “He’d make sausage, he’d make sauce out of anything-sauce out of crab legs, sauce out of snails, in the old days I think they made sauce out of sparrows. Back home, he was a house painter he never worked in a restaurant (though the Schrementi side of Dan’s family has a long-running Italian restaurant in south suburban Steger). You don’t know anyone like that, and yet it’s comforting to know that somewhere out there in Chicago, they still exist.ĭante had been a seaman, working a landing craft on D-Day. Italian sausage, from a 60-year-old (at least!) recipe passed down from a grandfather who was one bullet on D-Day away from losing it forever. There are people who grew up in a neighborhood known by the name of its Catholic parish, and have a tribe-Italian, Irish, Polish, whatever. And it comforts you to know that somewhere out there, this is a city where somebody gets a hundred friends together-a hundred friends! Imagine knowing a hundred people, outside of your office!-to make Italian sausage in their garage on a chilly Saturday. You might be a leaf in the wind, blown from one city to the next.īut the promise of Chicago is that out there, there are people not like that. You might not know your neighbors you might celebrate the holidays alone, or with someone you met who, like you, is from somewhere far away. YOU MIGHT LIVE IN A HIGH-rise, far above the city, and work in another just as high.
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