On Christmas Day, 1879, guests at the Maxwell House Hotel — the grandest hotel in the American South — sat down to a holiday dinner that included, among the roasted turkeys and plum puddings, a dish listed on the menu in a tone of unmistakable civic pride: “Hart and Hensley’s Spice Round of Beef, en Sockle, Ornamented.”
It was not a recipe imported from New York or Paris. It was Nashville’s own.
The story begins, like so many Nashville stories, with the Cumberland River.
After the Civil War, Nashville became a hub of the meatpacking industry in the American South. The river was a major shipping route between North and South, and the city’s stockyards were booming. Into this economy came a wave of German and Swiss immigrants — butchers by trade and by temperament — who settled in the neighborhood north of Jefferson Street that would become known as Germantown.
They brought their knives, their sausage recipes, and their instinct for thrift. The names on the Market House stalls read like a roll call from the Rhine: Jacobs, Warner, Dieterle, Stier, Neuhoff, Power, Laitenberger. The Catholic Church of the Assumption, founded in 1859, held its services in German. The children went to public school and learned English. The fathers went to work and spoke the old language of curing and brining.
One of them was William Jacobs, who had come from Wittenburg, Germany. Discharged from the army in 1865, he returned to Nashville and opened a stall in the old Market House in 1870. He knew that Rinderbraten — a German beef roast cured in brine — could preserve meat through the winter without refrigeration. He began producing batches for the local market, and by 1865, he had convinced the Maxwell House Hotel to put it on the winter menu.
The dish that Nashville came to call Spice Round — or sometimes Spiced Round — was born from necessity.
Every September, the butchers got a long run on beef round. The surplus was too much to sell before it spoiled, so the rounds went into brine and were stored in the potato cellar — the coldest room in the house. Then in October, at hog-killing time, there was a run on pork, which produced a surplus of fat from the back-strip.
The German butchers saw two problems and made one solution.
They took the brined beef rounds — not the choicest cuts, but thick and workable — and larded them with strips of pork fat that had been rolled in a closely guarded blend of spices: salt, red pepper, brown sugar, allspice, cloves. The fat was pulled through the beef with a hollow needle, an inch apart, in rows. The whole thing was sewn into cloth and boiled. When you sliced it cold, the cross-section showed a checkerboard of pink beef dotted with white spiced fat. It was beautiful. It was delicious. And it kept.
“Choose a select round cut of beef, four or five inches thick, and pickle in brine of salt and saltpeter for two weeks,” instructed the Tennessean in 1910. “With a hollow auger-like instrument force the strips of fat through the beef about an inch apart.”
Another butcher, Alex Warner, had married a Swiss woman from the settlement called Little Switzerland — centered at Tenth Avenue South and Caruthers Avenue, the present site of Waverly-Belmont School. In 1867, he established his own meatpacking business at 17th and Heiman Streets. Its large windmill was a landmark in the fast-growing city.
Warner developed his own Spice Round recipe, inspired partly by the English tradition of the boar’s head. His grandson Howell Warner would later insist that the recipe was kept under lock and key in the vault at the firm’s Charlotte Avenue location. Only two people alive knew it.
But the Warners were not alone. The Jacobs family, the Fehrs, the Powers — they were a closely knit group who had settled in Nashville and gone into the meat business together. They discussed methods. They competed. They guarded their secrets. At the peak, there were over thirty butchers in Nashville, and nearly all of them produced their own Spice Round.
The Tennessean put it plainly in 1910:
“Georgia boasts the roast ‘possum; Virginia, its hoecake; and nearly every other State has some delicacy which is featured especially at holiday time. In Tennessee spiced round is the dish that graces the bountiful Yuletide table. It is essentially a Volunteer State dish.”
The Jacobs Packing Company alone packed thirty to forty thousand pounds every season. Orders came from across the country — and then from across the world. Spice Rounds were shipped regularly to Honolulu, England, Austria, Alaska, and Canada.
There is a story — possibly apocryphal, but too good not to tell — about a prominent Nashville lady who returned from an extensive trip to Europe. In Vienna, she had dined in the city’s most famous restaurants, but one evening before the opera, she ate at a friend’s home. To her surprise and delight, the pièce de résistance was a Spice Round cured by Alex Warner and Son — from her own hometown.
Nashville’s Christmas meat had made it to a Viennese dinner table.
Miss Jane Thomas, in Old Days in Nashville, described the holiday preparations of an earlier era:
“For weeks before the old-time Christmas the ladies of the house were preparing for the Christmas dinner: penning up the turkeys to fatten, preparing mince-meat for pies, and making all kinds of pickles, and saving eggs and butter for cakes, making spice rounds, and such things.”
It was woven into the fabric of the season — alongside the plum pudding, the sillibub, the bowl of egg-nog at four o’clock in the morning. You didn’t have Christmas in Nashville without Spice Round on the table.
Then the world changed.
Refrigeration arrived, and the old reason for brining and curing — the impossibility of keeping fresh meat through winter — simply vanished. The small butchering shops of Germantown gave way to large packing houses. The residential neighborhood that had been “advertised in local newspapers as a growing and fashionable community” became industrial.
And then came the war. World War I turned German heritage from a source of civic pride into a liability. “In 1917 the reservoir was closed to visitors,” wrote Wilbur Creighton in Building of Nashville. “The paper had been filled with stories of German atrocities, such as the use of poisonous gases and deliberate infection of water supplies.” Some citizens suggested people should kill their dachshunds. German families instructed their elders to stop speaking German, even at home. The churches switched to English services. The uniqueness of a small community with ties to the Fatherland was over.
Germantown declined. The butchers closed or consolidated. The recipes — those closely guarded secrets in vaults and old coffee grinders — went with them.
Today, if you walk through Nashville’s Germantown, you will find a beautifully restored historic district, a Bicentennial Mall, brick sidewalks and Oktoberfest celebrations. You will not find Spice Round. A few specialty butchers in Middle Tennessee still produce it in small batches around the holidays, a whisper of what was once a roar. Most Nashvillians have never heard of it.
“Beef is not as delicious prepared in any other way,” the Tennessean had insisted in 1910. “As a matter of fact, spiced round runs good old sweet ham a close second.”
A city full of people who will argue passionately about hot chicken has no memory of the dish that once defined its Christmas table — the one that traveled from a potato cellar in Germantown to the Maxwell House menu to a dining room in Vienna. The one born not from ambition but from thrift. Two surpluses and a cold room, and the ingenuity to see that one solved the other.
That was Nashville’s Christmas meat. And Nashville forgot.
Photo: NYPL / Public Domain