BERLIN: US President George W. Bush reputedly once turned down Germany’s ubiquitous “currywurst,” the curried sausage cherished as a national institution, but it’s now starring in a new film – and a museum.

A total of 800 million currywursts, nicknamed “the poor man’s steak,” are gobbled up every year in Germany – that means 10 per person.

Now a museum devoted to currywurst is due to open in Berlin next year in tribute to what organisers call a “piece of German cultural and social history”.

Despite its name, the sausage is not curried. The secret of this singular delicacy is the sauce the meat is drenched in: a simple but unforgettable melange of pureed tomatoes sprinkled with curry powder.

Most loved in Berlin, Hamburg and the industrial Ruhr region, it is served sliced up at Germany’s omnipresent outdoor snack bars any time of the day or night in a cardboard dish with a plastic or wooden fork, accompanied with a bread roll or chips.

It is former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s favourite snack. And automaker Volkswagen’s own variety served up in factory canteens is so popular that Volkswagen sells more currywursts than it does Golf cars.

But where did the recipe come from?

According to Ulla Wagner’s new film “Die Entdeckung der Currywurst” (“The Invention of Curried Sausage”), it was a woman named Lena Bruecker who accidentally came up with the recipe in bombed-out Hamburg just after World War II.

In a slow-moving film that serves up much more than just sausages, Bruecker (Barbara Sukowa) falls for a young sailor (Alexander Khuon) in 1945 and hides him in her flat so he can avoid going to war.

In an echo of the hit 2003 film “Good Bye Lenin!,” in which a young man keeps the demise of communist East Germany secret from his ailing mother, Bruecker does not tell her sailor boy that the war is over in order to keep the fun going.

But the game, and the affair, soon ends – though the recipe emerges. About 10 minutes before the film is over, Bruecker, feeling fragile after losing her love, drops a bottle of ketchup and a jar of curry powder.

She licks her fingers while cleaning up the mess and suddenly thinks: this tastes good. And presto, currywurst is born.—AFP