Greg's Ghreme

As far back as I can remember, my family has always had smoked sausage and our horseradish and beet concoction for Christmas breakfast, New Years breakfast and Easter breakfast. I remember, when I was a little guy, how grandpa Joe Fedak grew horseradishes, and a lot of other stuff in his garden, on East 173rd Street off St Clair Avenue. The garden was next to the 1 &½ car garage Joe and his wife’s cousin Joe Kaminski and friends and family built in the back yard. There was a pear tree right behind the house. The whole back yard was surrounded by a four foot wire fence. All around the back yard, up to the garden, were beautiful flowers. The yard and garden was perfectly maintained. Not a weed in the place. They had hundreds of snap dragon flowers. Larry and I and Doug and Gayle used to pick snap dragons and chase after each other, pretending the snap dragons would bite. Big fun. The lawn was all creeping bent grass, which golf courses use for their greens. There were no weeds. It was almost perfect. But we could always run and play on it. Anyway, back to the ghreme.

I remember Grandma Helen Fedak sitting on the back porch, grating the horseradishes from the garden, for the chreme. The word chreme was more guttural. This is just the way I chose to spell it. Then they would add the beets, grown in the garden, vinegar, salt, sugar and pepper, and mix it all up. There was no recipe. What we have now is my best attempt to recreate what they made. And it’s constantly being changed, as I strive to make it better, so it’s Greg’s Ghreme.

The Recipe


Eight cans, small whole beets-(sliced beets are just fine) (14 oz or so) 2 jars of 8.5 oz. bottle of horseradish. Prepared horseradish. Fresh. or: 16 oz. of pure horseradish. Or a few ounces less.
The ratio is about 7 ounces of beets to 1 ounce of horseradish.

1 cup of Burgundy Wine. (Cheap brands work fine) The better the wine, the better the flavor, I think. Add salt and pepper to taste.
(About 2 teaspoons of salt and less than 1/4 teaspoons pepper)


Open beet cans and drain off all water. Use hand crank sausage grinder or food processor to grind up beets in bowl. Squeeze all the juice out of the ground up beets. Measure the amount you squeezed off and replace it with wine.
Add horseradish and wine.
Add salt and pepper to taste.
Mix until the consistency is uniform. (5-10 minutes)
(Makes 2+ mason jars of ghreme.)

Should be made two to four days before serving with the ham and
sausage and rye bread. Always use horseradish fresh from the store. Old horseradish changes the consistency and flavor. The Ghreme gets weaker every day. Can be fixed up by adding more horseradish, according to your taste.

The other prime ingredient is the smoked sausage. Until Grandma and Grandpa got too old, they made their own smoked sausage. They used pork butts. They cut the meat away from the bone, trimmed away fat and chopped the pork into 1/2 inch chunks. They mixed in garlic, salt and pepper to taste. Then grandma stuffed the sausage into pigs intestines they bought from the butcher, making 5 inch links. (I watched them make it.) They both died, three months apart, when I was 23. There was no recipe. Grandpa tasted the raw meat, then spit it out and told grandma what it needed. Then, Grandpa smoked the sausage, using only fruit wood, in a paper barrel in the back yard. Then they hung the smoked sausage on wooden poles in the basement for months and months and months. Before every holiday, they gave us a bunch of Grandpa’s sausage and ghreme.

After they died, Dad got their grinder and their sausage stuffer. Eventually, we got a better grinder from Cindy Fedak's Mom, Marian Pierce. That's the one we use today.My Mom liked Grandpa’s sausage as much as Dad and I did. So we decided to make our own. We laboriously cut the pork butts. We added seasoning. Mom did the taste testing. We all taste tested. I didn’t have a clue what it needed. Then we smoked it, using Grandpa’s paper barrel. It didn’t even remotely taste like what we loved. But we tried a couple of more times. The second time, the barrel caught fire. So Dad and I took our sausage over to Uncle Demitri Szmagala’s house near Cam’s corner to complete the smoking. Weka Metro (sp) was happy to help us. The next time we made sausage, Dad told me to take the sausage and fruit wood over to his uncle’s house myself. The smoking process took hours. I was about 18 or 19 at the time. We got the fire started and the sausage smoking. It was a cold day. Metro suggested we go inside to warn up. He immediately brought out a bottle of Crown Royal and a couple of shot glasses. We each had a couple of shots and then went back out. We did that a couple of times. Aunt Bertha yelled at Metro about the booze. He’s just a kid. Metro just laughed, poured more shots and told her to get us something to eat. I was well lit by the time the sausage was finished.

That was the first time I really got to know Metro one on one. We always had fun together after that. I visited him in Middleburgh Hts, when he moved into a new house with his daughter and son-in-law, Nick and Mary Bobezcko. That guy could tell great stories. And he loved to tell dirty jokes. And I knew a ton of dirty jokes. We got on very well. I was very sad when he died.

After a few years, we gave up making sausage. After all, it was never that good. I suppose we could have gone in and made sausage with some of Dad’s relatives who could still make the old country stuff, but we never did. Mary and Nick probably still make the “real stuff.”

Dad started buying the sausage at a Slovenian Butcher shop on East 55th and Bonna Avenue. It was recommended to Dad by a good friend of his. The sausage was very good, but nowhere near as good as I remembered it. It was a two hour process to drive over there and back. The old man at Malensek’s Butcher shop died, leaving a son and daughter to carry on. As they got in their 60’s they got tired of the business. Their kids hated it. They were ready to retire. Couldn’t hire help to work with raw meat and the whole bit. So they made less and less sausage every year. At the end they only made #300 a day. If you weren’t one of the first 15 people in line, around Christmas or Easter, you didn’t get sausage. People came from all around to line up and hope to get some of that smoked sausage. I used to get there an hour early, to be first in line. By the time they opened the door, their would be forty people in line. In about 10 minutes, they were out of sausage. The butch shop guys were gruff and mean, like the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld’s TV show. One time I heard them say, let the animals in. Finally they just plain closed up.

Starting in 2005, I buy the sausage at State Meats at State Road and Tuxedo, in Parma, next door to Tuxedo bowling lanes. I get Slovenian smoked sausage. ( 4.89 / lb, April 2006) The “double smoked” is also very good. Maybe better. It’s about 3 ½ to 4 links per pound. For Christmas brunch, I boiled 5 pounds and probably needed 6 pounds. We had 10 for brunch. For new years brunch, I boiled 4 pounds for 5 people and that was more than enough. For Christmas, we should probably get 10-12 pounds of sausage.

State Meats vacuum packs the sausage. I sent Larry 12 links (3 ½ pounds) in a Postal (free) priority box. Sausage was $17 and priority mail was $11. Mailed it Wednesday at 2 PM. They got it with Friday’s mail. Two days!!

Sausage Cooking Instructions (As suggested by Uncle Wally – the best, juiciest sausage)

Put sausage in good sized pot and cover them with water. (No lid on Pot.) Cook at full heat until boiling. If they are straight from the freezer, it still works the same. The meat is already cooked in the smoking process. Boil for ten minutes. Then turn off the heat, put on the lid and let them sit in the boiling water for 20 minutes. Then drain and serve.

Got 15 # for Christmas. They are 3 ½ to 4 links per pound. Had 8 guests for Christmas morning, gave Larry 3 pounds and still had 4 pounds left for New Years with 5 guests.

Over the years, the making of the Ghreme has sort of taken on a life of it's own. It is a part of Greg and Phyllis' holiday tradition. Phyl never participates in the ritual of the "Making of the Ghreme." She sometimes watches. Often laughes. When someone is helping me, we always fool around. Joe and I have the official grinder, the traditional mixing spoon, the symbolic Ghreme jar we always use. The coffee jar with the red lid. And we drink burgandy while we make it, usually finishing off whatever is in the bottle. One of the most fun times was when Graeme and Laura Wilson were here for the ceremonial making of the ghreme. June 20, 2009, the day before Father's Day, I made up a 1/4 batch. As Joe's high school girlfriend Danielle put it, "after all, it's just slop."