Metzgerei Christian Nussbaum

The Meiringen butcher shop on Kirchgasse has been in the Nussbaum family since 1977, when Daniel and Pia Nussbaum took it over; their son Christian became its head on 1 June 2014. The shop specializes in what it calls Fleischspezialitäten aus dem Haslital — meat specialties of the Haslital valley — built around one signature product.

That product, Gumpesel, is a raw salami-style sausage the shop's own history traces to a butcher's shop attached to the Gasthof Hirschen in Meiringen, probably in the late nineteenth century. Sausages of this cured, uncooked style only reached Switzerland in the eighteenth century, and the shop's account notes that Meiringen's position as a transit point between Italy and Switzerland was likely not a coincidence in the recipe's arrival. Gumpesel is now described as anchored in Swiss culinary heritage, eaten mainly in the Bernese Oberland.

Production follows a fixed sequence: handpicked pork and lean beef are cleaned of sinew and fat, partially frozen, and minced; diced back fat is worked in with meat and spices by machine, checked as the mixture reaches a point the makers describe as the protein 'drawing threads'; the mix is stuffed into beef casings, each sausage a unique size; a brief steam treatment is followed by roughly a month in a traditional smoke chamber. Over that month the sausages lose up to 40% of their original weight before reaching slicing consistency.