Polly Campbell

pcampbell@enquirer.com

It’s a well-known fact that the secret ingredient in Cincinnati chili is chocolate. Recipes trying to reproduce the complex flavors of the famous dish of our city usually call for a bit of cocoa or unsweetened chocolate.

Nope. Don’t bother, says Dann Woellert, a blogger on food history and the author of a book about Cincinnati chili. It’s a myth.

Woellert has interviewed the owners of almost of the chili parlor owners in town. “They unequivocally say they do not use chocolate,” he said. "There are 14 spices in some of those recipes that would completely overpower any chocolate. Hey, cinnamon’s weird enough, right?"

Woellert isn’t satisfied with the things we all think we know about the food we eat. He’s not just a debunker, he’s a deep diver. Starting with the foods Cincinnatians eat now as a matter of habit, he makes it his hobby to trace them back in time. It’s sometimes like digging into a family genealogy: There is always one more generation back to go.

And in the digging, Woellert finds out about a lot more than food: Travel with him and you can learn about people and families, historical movements and immigration, among other things, along the way.

His two-year-old blog is Dann Woellert Food Etymologist, which suggests another way of looking at food history: Through the history of names, though he doesn't limit himself to words. In posts he has pondered the origin of sauerkraut balls, thrown light onto Kentucky chili buns, and thought about why it might be that we put tartar sauce on hamburgers.

He’s also written "The Authentic History of Cincinnati Chili" and "Historic Restaurants of Cincinnati," "Cincinnati Turner Societies," and "Cincinnati’s Northside Neighborhood," all with either History Press or Arcadia (which have now merged.)

One of his first blog posts was about goetta, another signature Cincinnati dish. “I hate it when people say, oh that's unique, you’ll find it nowhere else," he said. "In fact, it's part of a large family." Goetta's genealogy includes ancestors like something found in west-central Ohio that they call grits. Its siblings include pruttles from Kansas and its cousins are scrapple and haggis and any other meat dish stretched out with grains. Finding that genealogy tells a story of people who are poor but resourceful.

I spent a Saturday morning with Woellert recently, visiting the kind of places in Cincinnati that feed his obsession. We started at Avril’s, the butcher on Court Street that’s122 years old, with a case of sausages and meats that are like a gold mine for a food etymologist.blog

Why are brats in Cincinnati different than brats anywhere else? Why are the long linked sausages called yard sausages? What’s the difference between Leona and Hamilton metts?

Between Woellert and Avril's owner Len Bleh, I got a lesson in the sausages of Cincinnati. "These sausages aren't from any particular part of Germany, because people came here from all parts of Germany," said Woellert. And, while many are very similar to sausages you would find in Germany now, the names have changed.

There is a soft, spreadable sausage called a mettwurst in Germany that is completely different from our smoked mett. Our metts are like German Thuringer. What we call brats here are very different from, say, brats in Wisconsin. Ours are more like the Bavarian weisswurst. "Yardwurst was sold by the yard instead of the link," said Woellert. "It's an uncooked mett, so you couldn't cut the casing in between the links or it would fall out."

Makes sense. But then there's the Hamilton mett. Like all metts, it's a smoked sausage, usually pork and beef. But the different butchers around town who make it have their own recipe for added spices and grinds. It would make sense to think it came from Hamilton, just north of here. There was a theory that the name came came from the German word "hemel" meaning "town," Woellert doesn't really believe either of those. Really, a Hamilton mett is just a special mett with a different recipe than a regular one as interpreted by the butcher.

Like the Hamilton mett, Woellert, who’s 44, has a German genealogy. His father’s side of the family is strictly German; his mother’s a little more diverse, but his background is overwhelmingly the Catholic German one that so many Cincinnatians claim. He started his explorations in history with his own family’s genealogy.

“Turns out there’s an ancestor who is one of Nicholas Longworth’s daughter’s illegitimate sons," he said. Which means he's descended from Nicholas Longworth.

He grew up in Springfield Township. He currently lives in Oakley, and is in the food business himself, as a marketer for Henny Penny, a central Ohio company that makes deep-fryers for restaurants. His grandparents owned a bakery in Dayton called Ling's, which closed when he was very young, but he has early memories of the tastes and smells.

That’s one reason he got such a kick out of our next stop: Bononimi’s Bakery in Northside. We went there to try the zwieback, the only place Woellert knows of that still makes it. The little neighborhood bakery on Blue Rock Avenue seems well off the beaten path, but it was busy, full of customers ordering cheese crowns and coffee cakes.

The zwieback doesn’t really compete in allure with those baked goods. But Virginia Bonomini, who runs the bakery with her sons, said lots of people come in for it. "The people who like it really like it," she said. The name means “twice baked" in German, so it’s kind of a German biscotti. It’s made with sweet dough, baked, then sliced and baked again. “We used to rub two pieces together into a bowl of chicken broth,” said Bonomini. It was well known as something you’d give teething babies. Now you can get it plain or iced.

Bonomini gave us a look back into the kitchen, with its ancient ovens and machines, and got in a pretty well-informed discussion with Woellert about the old theaters of Northside, some of which closed before he was born. We left with a loaf of their light rye bread, an un-seeded, un-salted loaf with a lightly crisp and chewy crust. It might seem like generic rye bread until you know the history of it: it was originally baked on an open hearth oven at Volz bakery, which was where Virginia Bonomini grew up, around the corner from the current bakery.

Next stop: The Madison cafe in Madison Bowl, a bowling alley on Madison Road, where we met up with Larry Misleh. He runs the cafe and recently bought the bowling alley. Woellert thought it was interesting that Misleh, from a family that was the first Skyline franchisees, was making his own chili. He’d heard the secret ingredient was mock turtle soup.

True, said Misleh. "Growing up in Skyline, you don't know the recipe. You get it from the commissary. But I also worked at La Rosa's growing up, and I noticed when I walked by the pot of mock turtle soup it smelled like Skyline." So he has a special mix of chili seasoning packs, the soup and ground beef.

We had a taste: maybe a little more vinegary than some? But good. Cincinnati chili is alive and well.

The Misleh family, like several of the chili families in town, were originally Middle Eastern. His family has Palestinian, Lebanese and German roots. His grandfather owned a restaurant called El Arab on 3rd Street, Downtown, for 50 years.

By the next day, Woellert had a post up on his blog about the restaurant, complete with photos and a matchbook from the restaurant he'd found on ebay. And he ended his post with a discussion about kibbeh, the Lebanese dish of lamb mixed with bulgur wheat: " You might even go so far as to call it "Lebanese goetta."

Suffice to say, after what I had witnessed on our tour, if Dann's the one who's talking, I'm in. It's Lebanese goetta.