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The Immigrant Kitchens That Built Wisconsin Cuisine

6 minute read

  • Wisconsin history
  • Immigrant traditions
  • Food history

Every plate of Wisconsin food is a map, if you know how to read it. The brat on the hard roll points to Germany. The flaky oval pastry on the bakery counter points to Denmark by way of Racine. The squeak of a fresh cheese curd points to Switzerland through Green County, and the fish fry line on a Friday night points to Poland, to Bavaria, to anywhere the church calendar said no meat today.

Wisconsin cuisine wasn’t invented. It immigrated, wave by wave, kitchen by kitchen. Here’s the map, drawn honestly.

The Germans: brats, sausage, and a way of gathering

No group shaped Wisconsin’s table like the Germans. Even today, 40.5 percent of Wisconsin residents claim German-American heritage, and by 1900 about a third of the state’s population had German roots. As Mark Louden of UW-Madison’s Max Kade Institute told Wisconsin Public Radio, the draw was simple: land, cheap and plentiful. What they brought in return included the sausage-maker’s craft, and one sausage above all.

Sheboygan takes its bratwurst so seriously that when Bucyrus, Ohio dared claim the title of Bratwurst Capital in 1970, a local judge issued a good-natured “official decision” awarding it to Sheboygan and barring all challengers. It was a publicity stunt, but one with a paper trail, reported in the Sheboygan Press that August. The city had already been throwing an annual celebration for years: the first Bratwurst Day, dreamed up by newspaper editor A. Matt Werner in 1953, featured a bratwurst queen, a brat-eating contest, and roughly 7,000 pounds of sausage. Sheboygan doctrine holds that a proper brat is fried, served on a round hard roll with onions and brown mustard, and that ordering a “double” is less an option than a lifestyle.

The Germans gave Wisconsin something less tangible, too: Gemutlichkeit, the unhurried warmth of a shared table that still defines the state’s supper clubs. We’ve told that story in its own post.

The Cornish: a lunch you could carry into a mine

Before the Germans dominated, the Cornish came for lead. In the 1830s and ’40s, miners from Cornwall poured into the southwestern hills around Mineral Point, chasing galena ore. The exodus from Cornwall was staggering: more than half the population left between the 1830s and 1900, and by 1850 several thousand Cornish settlers worked the Upper Mississippi lead region.

They brought the pasty, a hand-held pastry packed with beef, rutabagas, onions, and potatoes, built for a workday underground. University of Wisconsin historians note the thick crimped crust doubled as a handle: a miner would grip the crimp, eat the middle, and toss the crust, sometimes leaving it as an offering to the “Tommyknockers,” the spirits said to haunt the shafts. You can still eat a proper pasty in Mineral Point today, superstitions optional.

The Swiss: the cheese state gets its cheese

Wisconsin’s dairy identity owes an outsized debt to a small band of Swiss settlers. Facing financial crisis at home, 108 Swiss citizens crossed the Atlantic and founded New Glarus in Green County. When Wisconsin’s wheat economy collapsed, they did what Swiss farmers knew: they milked. Nicklaus Gerber opened Green County’s first cheese factory in the late 1860s, limburger first and then Swiss, and by 1910 the county alone counted 222 cheese factories, the most in the state. Multiply that story across a thousand crossroads and you get America’s Dairyland, and eventually the cheese curd itself.

The Danes: thirty-two layers of Racine

Head to Racine and the map points to Denmark. Danish immigrants arriving in the late 1800s made the city famous for kringle, an oval, buttery, thirty-two-layer pastry that takes three days to make properly. Its name, the state tourism office notes, comes from old Scandinavian sailing terms for knots. Racine’s bakeries (Bendtsen’s, Larsen’s, Lehmann’s, O&H) have kept the tradition alive for over a century, and in 2013 the Wisconsin legislature made it official, writing into the statute books with admirable brevity: “The kringle is the state pastry.” The same statute covers milk as the state beverage and cheese as the state dairy product. Wisconsin knows itself.

The Norwegians: lefse, lutefisk, and the church basement

Norwegian settlers spread through the state’s western and southern counties in the 1860s, and their food traditions survived where community did: the church. In Stoughton, Christ Lutheran Church still hosts annual dinners of lefse and lutefisk. Near Black Earth, the Vermont Lutheran Church rinses more than 700 pounds of lutefisk through three days and four changes of water for a supper that feeds a thousand people. Lefse, the soft potato flatbread, carries what Edible Madison calls the flavor “of poverty and survival,” humble ingredients from short northern growing seasons, rolled thin and griddled. How lutefisk itself began is anyone’s guess. The origin stories range from a lye spill to St. Patrick, and Norwegians and Swedes both claim it. Some legends are best served with butter and left unresolved.

The Poles and Belgians: fish, pierogi, and a fifty-gallon kettle

Milwaukee’s Polish community grew from a few thousand in the 1870s to seventy thousand by 1910, building parishes, filling the South Side, and running the Jones Island fishing community that helped put fried fish on Wisconsin’s Friday tables. Their church-supper tables still fill with pierogi, golabki, and kielbasa at parish feasts across the state.

And in the far northeast, more than 15,000 Belgian settlers arrived before the Civil War, founding towns named Brussels and Namur (today the heart of the first rural National Historic Landmark district in the country) and holding harvest Kermiss celebrations since 1858. Their kitchens are the most likely birthplace of booyah, the thick chicken stew believed to have been brought by Walloon immigrants, cooked in fifty-gallon kettles over two days and served to entire towns. Even the word is an immigrant: most accounts trace “booyah” to a phonetic Walloon spelling of the French bouillon.

One more kitchen on the map

The butter burger deserves a mention, if only because Wisconsin argues about it so lovingly. Milwaukee’s Solly’s Grille claims the first, in 1936: a sirloin patty crowned with a heaping teaspoon of Wisconsin butter. Kroll’s in Green Bay worked the same magic around the same era, and partisans of Charlie Nagreen point to butter-fried burgers at the Seymour fair back in 1885. We take no side. We simply note that only in Wisconsin would the argument be about which genius put butter on the burger.

The map ends at our door

Emmi’s is what happens when all these kitchens simmer together for 175 years. Look at our menu and you’ll see the map: griddled Wisconsin bratwurst draped in hollandaise on our Bratwurst Benedict, brats in a blanket with spicy mustard, crisp Norwegian waffles with raspberry jam, hand-battered cheese curds from the Swiss-built dairy tradition, and a Friday-style fish fry with roots in Polish and German parishes, served any night of the week overlooking Lake Geneva.

Every dish is a reflection of cherished memories, most of them somebody’s grandmother’s, carried here in a trunk. We just try to do them justice.

Sources & Further Reading