It could be wurst: A brief history of South Australia’s happiest deli treat

Bung a bunch of different meats together, add salt, some secret ingredients. Best not to know what they all are but have you ever wondered how fritz became an SA lunchbox staple?

• Unthinkable: Foodland bans free smiley fritz after woman’s fall

Bung a bunch of different meats together, add salt, some secret ingredients. Best not to know what they all are.

No one really calls fritz “bung”, except maybe the Germans who settled in the Adelaide Hills after the second World War.

The Germans were the kings of the sausage and back in the day in Adelaide we ate a sort of sausage apparently named after a German called Fritz.

To kids, it was the Saturday morning treat.

I remember pushing my way through strips of disgusting latex on the butcher’s door on King William Road, while my parents checked out the array of meats. They had shanks back then, which are cool again now, but they didn’t sell organic, saltbush lamb.

The bug zapper would go off intermittently to keep the flies at an acceptable level; I remember country butchers also having sticky traps where you could properly see the carnage of invading insects.

The Tanunda Foodland sparked a brief but passionate cultural crisis by posting this sign this week. Picture: Supplied

In Adelaide, hot and bored kids trooped along, getting pernickety at each other while the parents bought cheap sausages for the week and a good cut for the Saturday night dinner party.

Always – always! – the butcher would give you a sympathetic smile and a slice of smiley fritz. They must have made them specially for kids because there was always a proper “bung” fritz with a neat metal tie sitting in with the mettwurst and other truly exotic meats.

(It was probably kept separately because “bung” fritz is encased in sheep guts. No doubt smiley fritz is too, but don’t tell the kids).

The smiley fritz was just for us. Kinda creepy in hindsight. Composite meat in a roll with darker composite meat inserted so that when it went through the horror-grade slicer you’d have slender pieces of non-meat with lopsided smiles.

We bloody loved it. Simple, gruesome pleasures.

The ABC reports that fritz was commonly believed to be made of “bum, lips and rubbish offcuts”, but I distinctly remember my authoritative dad saying it was definitely “lips, tits and arseholes”.

Fritz’s nostalgic notoriety comes partly because of the actual nomer “fritz”. Elsewhere it’s known as Devon, which sounds very civilised. Calling it fritz is as SA as having weird beer sizes and one-way expressways.

Most of the nostalgia, though, comes from that tradition of a slice of fritz on a Saturday morning. Obviously – almost doesn’t need saying – fritz is superior when served on cheap white bread with no-name margarine and a brand-name tomato sauce.

But the connection between us and fritz is not that gourmet sensation; it’s much more basic. A hot Saturday, a friendly butcher and a slice of fritz. And later, maybe, a lazy barbecue with noisy parents and a goonbag, and the chance of a stray After-Dinner Mint.

Heaven in a sheep gut.