Vienna sausages—along with (it must be said) potted meat—rank high among the South’s signature noshes, both indispensable companions to the purple worms and Little Rebels in your tackle box.
Historically, a Vienna-style sausage (Wienerwurst) is a frankfurter-style mixture of meats sold in braided links, but in America it transmogrified into a canned sausage cut into two-inch lengths that appeared around 1900. Chicago-based Armour, Swift, and Libby, along with Hormel in Minnesota, soon dominated the market.. The first commercial meat processor in Mississippi, Bryan Packing Company of West Point, unlike northern companies, began canning sausages in oil, and these old-school Bryan “vy-ennas” are legendary.
Vienna consumption has declined since its heyday in the middle of the 20th century. Armour, which introduced the pop-top aluminum can, remains the industry sales leader. Viennas—like Spam—seeped into international cuisines through U.S. military bases. The sausages are used in Filipino pancits, and a popular Cuban dish consisting of Viennas cooked with yellow rice (arroz amarillo con salchichas) likely comes courtesy of Guantanamo Bay.
This is a nice photo. For awhile there while I was in school I would go over to my Mom’s looking for something to eat. And that is what I would find. Not with oil, though.