Introduction
In 1938, the Slovenian-American newspaper Prosveta advertised a community festivity with the following invitation:
Another thing that we are sure will please everyone is — the Kranjska sausage. They seem to be everyone’s weakness, don’t they? But believe me, folks, you haven’t eaten Kranjska sausages until you have eaten the ones that the ladies of Avella make. Boy, oh boy, they certainly take the cake.Footnote 1 (Prosveta 1938)
Although intended as lighthearted promotional prose, this passage is revealing. The Kranjska sausage (kranjska klobasa, plural kranjske klobase) appears not merely as a food item, but as an object of pride, authenticity, and cultural distinction. Framed as “everyone’s weakness” and as something that “certainly takes the cake,” the sausage emerges as a condensed symbol of communal belonging and shared taste. A seemingly mundane culinary object thus acquires symbolic weight within the Slovenian diaspora, functioning simultaneously as nourishment, social glue, and emblem of national identity. Crucially, this points to a dimension of nationalism that extends beyond state institutions and elite discourse: the glorification of the nation through everyday practices and material culture.
Nationalist movements typically construct teleological and celebratory narratives in which the nation appears as an enduring, heroic, and morally elevated entity. As Benedict Anderson (1983) famously argued, such narratives are central to the formation of “imagined communities,” sustained through myths of origin, shared struggle, and cultural distinction. These glorifying impulses are most often associated with state propaganda, commemorative rituals, school curricula, and elite cultural production. Yet, as this article demonstrates, practices of glorification also permeate ordinary social life. They are enacted by everyday actors who, in much of the classical literature on nationalism, remain marginal or invisible.
While seminal works on nationalism and nation-building, such as Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (Reference Hobsbawm and Ranger1983), Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), and Mosse’s The Nationalization of the Masses (Reference Mosse1975) have examined glorification primarily at institutional and elite levels, they tend to conceptualize it as a process imposed “from above.” More recent scholarship on “banal nationalism” and “everyday nationalism” (Billig Reference Billig1995; Edensor Reference Edensor2002; Fox and Miller-Idriss Reference Fox and Miller-Idriss2008; Skey Reference Skey2011; Goode and Stroup Reference Goode and Stroup2015) has sought to counter this top-down view by foregrounding the ways in which nationalism is enacted, embodied, and reproduced in daily life. Nevertheless, the specific role of glorification within these everyday practices remains insufficiently theorized. This article addresses that gap by examining how national glorification operates in quotidian contexts — here, through food — thereby complicating the presumed boundary between elite and popular nationalism.
The article advances the study of nationalism by proposing a framework for analyzing glorification as an everyday practice. By focusing on the Kranjska sausage as a case study, it explores how food — an ostensibly practical, mundane, and apolitical domain — became a vehicle of national pride and symbolic distinction among Slovenian emigrants in the United States between 1919 and 1945. The contribution is threefold. First, the article extends theories of everyday nationalism by foregrounding glorification as a specific modality of national reproduction in daily life. Second, it highlights the role of material culture and culinary practices in shaping affective attachments to the nation. Third, drawing on Slovenian-American newspapers, it offers an emic perspective on how migrant communities themselves articulated and negotiated national belonging in a diasporic context.
Methodologically, the article adopts what George and Bennett (Reference George and Bennett2005) describe as a heuristic case study, using particularly illustrative and understudied cases to generate conceptual insights rather than statistically representative findings. It also builds on my earlier research on the role of the Kranjska sausage in Slovenian nationalism, including an article published in Slovenian that likewise examined Slovenian emigrants in the United States and drew on the same corpus of sources (Mlekuž Reference Mlekuž2022a). While that earlier study focused primarily on everyday nationalism, the present article shifts the analytical emphasis toward glorification and draws on a different selection of newspaper materials.
Slovenians in the USA: Migration, identity, and the making of a national sausage
From the mid-nineteenth century until 1924, the USA was the most important destination of Slovenian transnational migration. Emigration from Carniola — here taken as an indicator of broader migration processes across the Slovenian ethnic territory — and other Slovenian lands of the Habsburg Empire increased steadily from the 1890s onward. Between 1892 and 1914, 85901 people emigrated from Carniola to the United States alone, nearly three-quarters of them after 1900. The outbreak of the First World War brought migration almost to a halt, while restrictive US immigration legislation in the postwar period redirected Slovenian emigrants toward other destinations, including France and Germany within Europe and Argentina and other South American countries overseas (Kalc, Milharčič Hladnik, and Žitnik Serafin Reference Kalc, Mirijam and Serafin2024, 56–59).
The earliest Slovenian settlers in the USA formed small farming communities in central Minnesota in the mid-nineteenth century, encouraged not only by American land-promotion campaigns but also by Slovenian Catholic clergy active in the region. Far more numerous, however, were later migrants who settled in compact ethnic communities in industrial and mining centers across multiple states. Major centers included Chicago and its surroundings, Joliet, Pittsburgh and nearby towns such as Canonsburg and Strabane, Detroit, Calumet, the mining settlements of Minnesota’s Iron Range (Tower, Ely, Eveleth, Chisholm, Duluth), San Francisco, Pueblo and Denver in Colorado, Milwaukee and Sheboygan in Wisconsin, New York, and, above all, Cleveland, which emerged as the largest center of Slovenian settlement in the United States (Prisland Reference Prisland1968, 89–148).
According to US census data based on mother tongue, there were 184 thousand Slovene speakers in 1910, of whom 124 thousand were born in Imperial Austria. In 1920, the census recorded 209 thousand Slovene speakers, more than half of whom were already US-born. By 1940, this number had declined to 184 thousand, including approximately 103 thousand members of the second generation and 6 thousand of the third (Klemenčič Reference Klemenčič1984, 29). Many scholars have noted that methodological limitations likely resulted in undercounting and suggest that by the interwar period, as many as 300 thousand people of Slovenian origin may have lived in the United States — a significant figure when compared to the approximately 1.3 million Slovenians residing at the time in Yugoslavia, Italy, and Austria combined (Kalc, Milharčič Hladnik, and Žitnik Serafin Reference Kalc, Mirijam and Serafin2024, 61).
Slovenian identity in the USA was neither self-evident nor static, but actively constructed through dense networks of institutions, practices, and everyday social relations. From the late nineteenth century onward, Slovenian immigrants created what might be described as a “Slovenian world in miniature,” despite limited formal education, modest incomes as industrial workers and miners, and the absence of institutional support from the host state. Central to this process were fraternal benefit societies that functioned as mutual insurance systems, followed by a wide associational infrastructure encompassing choirs, theatrical groups, brass bands, libraries and reading rooms, newspapers and publishing ventures, Slovenian-language schools, churches, national halls, recreational centers, and a broad range of ethnic businesses. These institutions provided material security and social cohesion while also serving as key arenas for the reproduction and negotiation of Slovenian identity in a migrant setting (Kalc, Milharčič Hladnik, and Žitnik Serafin Reference Kalc, Mirijam and Serafin2024, 241–64).
This identity was internally plural and politically contested. Slovenian associational life in the USA was sharply divided along ideological lines between conservative Catholic, liberal, and socialist camps — a division institutionalized in parallel fraternal organizations, women’s associations, cultural societies, and media outlets. These tensions mirrored political developments in the homeland and persisted well into the twentieth century, subsiding only temporarily during moments of perceived existential threat, most notably during the Second World War. Nevertheless, despite ideological polarization, most Slovenian immigrants experienced strong feelings of belonging, solidarity, and mutual support. Especially during the interwar period — the high point of Slovenian organizational and cultural life in the USA — participation in fraternal and cultural institutions intensified, even amid economic crisis and social insecurity. Slovenian identity in the diaspora thus emerged as a lived and practiced form of belonging, actively remade under the conditions of migration, industrial labor, and American ethnic pluralism (Kalc, Milharčič Hladnik, and Žitnik Serafin Reference Kalc, Mirijam and Serafin2024, 241–64).
It was within this dense institutional and cultural context that the Kranjska sausage emerged as a particularly potent marker of Slovenian identity. Named after Carniola (Kranjska) — the province widely regarded as the most ethnically “Slovenian” part of the former Habsburg Empire — the sausage functioned both as a representative culinary symbol of Slovenian migrants in the United States and as a broader emblem of national belonging. While it closely resembled other Central and Southern European pork sausages, its perceived “Slovenianness” rested less on radical culinary distinctiveness than on a specific combination of naming, standardization, and cultural embedding. Traditionally made from coarsely minced pork and seasoned in a restrained manner — typically with garlic, salt, and pepper, without paprika—it emphasized visible chunks of meat and an aesthetic of simplicity associated with rural honesty and artisanal production (Mlekuž Reference Mlekuž2020a, Reference Mlekuž2020b, Reference Mlekuž2022b).
After the Second World War, a significant shift occurred specifically within the USA. While in Slovenia the sausage continued to be known as kranjska klobasa, in American contexts it was increasingly translated and marketed as “Slovenian sausage.” This change did not reflect a transformation of the dish itself in the homeland, but rather a diasporic adaptation shaped by the need for legibility within a multiethnic American foodscape. Initially circulating primarily within Slovenian immigrant institutions and social spaces — such as picnics, taverns, benefit events, and ethnic associations — the sausage gradually moved beyond these boundaries and entered a wider regional and ethnic market. By the late twentieth century, it was no longer recognized solely as an internal ethnic marker but had become familiar outside the Slovenian community as “Slovenian sausage,” while in Slovenia it remained firmly anchored in its original name and symbolic geography. In this way, the Kranjska/Slovenian sausage illustrates how ethnic foods are re-signified in migrant settings: not through intrinsic culinary uniqueness alone, but through repeated acts of naming, recognition, and everyday use that transform a familiar dish into a stable and widely legible marker of collective identity.Footnote 2
Materials and methods (Recipe)
This article is based on an analysis of texts in which the Kranjska sausage appears in the Slovenian periodical press published in the United States during the interwar period. Sources were accessed through the Digital Library of Slovenia (DLIB). A search using the keyword “ kranjska klobasa ” yielded the following number of items: 708 in Glas naroda (The People’s Voice, 1919–45), 672 in Prosveta (Enlightenment, 1919–45), 511 in Amerikanski Slovenec (American Slovenian,Footnote 3 1919–45), 460 in Ameriška domovina (American Home, 1919–45; with some years unavailable), 335 in Glasilo K.S.K. Jednote (1919–45), 279 in Edinost (Unity, 1919–25), 132 in Enakopravnost (Equality, 1920–45; with some years unavailable), 100 in Proletarec (The Proletarian, 1919–45), and 35 in Ave Maria (1919–45). This amounts to a total of approximately 3232 items. Around half of these were advertisements, and a considerable portion consisted of “empty” entries—instances where the digital search identified a hit in the PDF, but no substantive reference to the sausage was present in the text.
All American Slovenian publications available in the Digital Library of Slovenia as of 2017 were surveyed. Newspaper materials were systematically collected and organized into thematic clusters (such as associational life, identity, relations with the homeland, everyday practices, etc.). From this corpus, the excerpts discussed in this article were selected using a heuristic case study approach. Rather than aiming at statistical representativeness, this approach treats individual cases as analytical probes: it privileges particularly illustrative, dense, or understudied examples that make visible how specific social and cultural processes operate. In this sense, the selected newspaper texts serve to illuminate patterns of meaning-making, identify connections between nationalism, everyday practice, and media representation, and generate conceptual and theoretical insights into Slovenian migrant identity formation.
The selected newspapers differ considerably in terms of ideological orientation, size, circulation, frequency of publication, and internal development across the period in question (for overviews of the Slovenian migrant press in the USA, see Bajec Reference Bajec1980; Kalc, Milharčič Hladnik, and Žitnik Serafin Reference Kalc, Mirijam and Serafin2024, 281–85). With the exception of the Catholic monthly Ave Maria, all titles belong to the major Slovenian migrant newspapers in the USA and together represent the core of the interwar Slovenian-language public sphere. Importantly, these newspapers did not articulate a single, unified form of Slovenian nationalism. Rather, they reflected and actively shaped different, often competing understandings of Slovenian identity, structured most visibly along the enduring divide between conservative Catholic (Amerikanski Slovenec, Ameriška domovina, Glasilo K.S.K. Jednote, Edinost, Ave Maria), liberal (Glas naroda), and socialist (Prosveta, Proletarec) political orientations. Some newspapers were not explicitly defined in political terms but nonetheless expressed a distinct worldview or ideological orientation, such as the progressive Enakopravnost. The newspapers ranged from weeklies to dailies and typically functioned as broad broadsheets covering politics, economics, culture, everyday life, and sports — both within migrant communities and in relation to the USA, the “old place,” and global affairs. The vast majority of material was published in Slovenian, although the first English-language article appeared in 1929, and by the 1930s, some newspapers had begun to include regular English-language columns, reflecting generational change and processes of linguistic and cultural accommodation.
The chronological framework of the study — 1919 to 1945 — requires a brief justification. As Montanari (Reference Montanari and Ipsen1993) has shown, political and chronological boundaries in the cultural history of food are often arbitrary, and the history of the Kranjska sausage cannot be reduced to the dictates of political history alone (see Mlekuž Reference Mlekuž2022b). Nevertheless, for Slovenian migrant communities in the USA, the interwar period represents a distinct and analytically coherent phase. Following the First World War and the introduction of restrictive US immigration policies, migration flows diminished significantly, and communities became increasingly settled and institutionally consolidated. At the same time, the homeland underwent profound political transformations: the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, the brief existence of the State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs (1918), the formation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929), and, for many Slovenian migrants and their descendants, incorporation into the Kingdom of Italy. These shifting political constellations are clearly reflected in the migrant press and, as this study demonstrates, also shaped discourses surrounding the Kranjska sausage as a marker of national belonging.
At the same time, reliance on newspapers as the primary source base entails important limitations that must be acknowledged. Newspapers reported selectively on certain phenomena while remaining silent on others, and when they did report, they did so through specific framings, narrative conventions, and evaluative tones. As scholars of nationalism have emphasized, the image of nationalism that emerges from newspapers is often stylized, intensified, or distorted rather than empirically representative of everyday social life (Judson Reference Judson2006; Zahra Reference Zahra2010). Newspapers must therefore be approached not as transparent mirrors of migrant experience but as media artefacts with their own representational logics and ambitions. In practice, this means that references to food, tradition, and national culture were shaped by editorial priorities, ideological commitments, genre conventions, and pragmatic goals such as mobilizing readers, reinforcing moral norms, or strengthening institutional loyalties. In the interwar period, newspapers functioned as powerful informational and ideological apparatuses, actively shaping as well as reflecting reality. As the most influential mass medium of the time, they flooded readers with cultural and political content on a regular basis, thereby contributing to the ongoing reproduction, negotiation, and imagining of nations in the diaspora (cf. Anderson Reference Anderson1991; Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm1990; Briggs and Burke Reference Briggs and Burke2005).
Results (Meat)
Numerous and diverse newspaper texts attest to the centrality of the Kranjska sausage as a marker of ethnic and national identity among Slovenian migrants in the United States. The sausage appears in the sources not merely as a food item but as a cultural signifier, invoked repeatedly to denote belonging, pride, and distinctiveness. One letter vividly expressed this sentiment, noting that it is a dish “which every Slovenian enjoys”:
A Slovenian orchestra playing polkas and other folk dances all day for the enjoyment of young and old alike. It’s surprising how hearts beat a little faster, and one’s feet are just a little lighter when an accordion plays a polka. For hearty appetites are “Kranjska sausages,” which every Slovenian enjoys. (Amerikanski Slovenec 1940)
Such references were common, especially in the column “Voices from the Settlements,” which regularly reported on the social life of Slovenian communities across the USA. An invitation to the “Prešeren’s 30th Anniversary” celebration, organized by the Pittsburgh society, illustrates this tendency: “I must not forget to say that we will have good tasty food and good ‘Kranjska sausages.’ Slovenians can’t be without – Kranjska sausages” (Prosveta 1941).
Even religious writing could hardly resist reference to this culinary emblem. The Catholic newspaper Ave Marija, in an article cautioning readers against “false prophets,” framed Kranjska sausage as a defining cultural marker — something that, paradoxically, could also verge on caricature: “Compatriots! Let us be grateful to God for the gift of true faith, and let us not be American Indians who used to give gold and ivory for painted shards, lest we become world-famous for our naivety in addition to the Kranjska sausages” (Ave Maria 1934).
In other instances, correspondents employed the sausage as a rhetorical device for defending Slovenian visibility in the broader European context. When one professor omitted Slovenians from his imagined “map” of a “new Europe,” an anonymous writer countered by appealing to a repertoire of Slovenian cultural expressions, among which Kranjska sausage occupied pride of place:
They said that a professor had drawn up a “map” for a “new” Europe. If he really went to school, he should be ashamed of himself for not knowing what we Slovenians are. It was getting dark, but if I could write English by the light, I would invite this professor to come to the Slovenians for some kind of a wedding, baptism or something, and he would see that we are also Slovenians in the world.
I would ask our authentic Slovenian cooks to serve this professor a couple of meters of authentic Kranjska sausages, a couple of models of potica, and a Californian wine made just the way we make it. I would introduce him to the writings of our Slovenian writers, to the sweet melodies of our Slovenian poets and composers. (Prosveta 1942)
Here, sausage is staged not simply as nourishment but as a performative declaration of identity: an edible manifesto of Slovenian cultural existence.
Although the Kranjska sausage dominated the symbolic field, other foods also served as important markers of Slovenianness, albeit in a less central way. Potica, for example, regularly appeared in descriptions of festive tables, where it embodied continuity with holiday traditions and domestic skill. As one account explained, no Slovenian celebration could be considered complete without this nut-filled pastry:
We would like to thank the Frank Kokil family for serving us so generously. Kranjska sausages and potica is the best food for Kranjska Micikas and Janezs [Micika (female) and Janez (male) are “typical” Slovenian names which are exclusive to the Slovenian-speaking population, and are used as a generic expression for Slovenians]. (Amerikanski Slovenec 1938)
Regarding the service, it should be mentioned that for the hungry there will be the famous Slovenian walnut potica, homemade Kranjska sausages and other delicacies that only our Slovenian wives know how to prepare. (Amerikanski Slovenec 1942)
Remember that there will be plenty of good drinks and food available. There will be several types of drinks, of course, but there will also be food, as we will also have fine Kranjska sausages, potica and several other such delicacies that our audience enjoys. I can tell you that no one can resist a piece of potica and a piece of Kranjska sausage. (Prosveta 1937)
However, unlike potica, the Kranjska sausage appears both more frequently and more prominently in migrant sources. Its privileged status is evident in numerous correspondences. One report announced a celebration with the following words: “On the last Saturday of this year, we will have a party to dance and have fun in 1923 and wish each other a Happy New Year. The best greeting is good, fresh Kranjska sausages[.]” (Glas naroda 1923)
Even its absence demanded acknowledgment, as another note makes clear: “We did not have Kranjska sausages available, even unfortunately. Instead, we had a few other snack delicacies. Of course, we also sang a couple of our Slovenian songs” (Glas naroda, 1934a). Its presence was expected to such a degree that its absence, when noted in reports, was experienced as a palpable lack, even a disruption of the normative festive script.
Such examples illustrate the exceptional symbolic weight of the sausage: it was the most convenient, the most common, and the most authoritative culinary signifier of Slovenianness among Slovenian migrants in the USA. Its ubiquity emerges across diverse genres of writing, including humorous sketches, such as one text on “living widows” — Slovenian women who had distanced themselves from the migrant community.
‘Finally, I have to say a serious word about the “living widows” that abound in Downtown and Brooklyn.
There are more and more of them every day and, as their outward appearance reveals, they are doing just fine. Without exception, they are all well– smeared and, in general, rather greasy and fat behind the ears.
Our customs and habits are being abandoned. They no longer like the Slovenian language. They are not moved by the Slovenian song. They do not feel comfortable in Slovenian society.
In other words, they do not care about authentic Kranjska sausage any more than they do about Italian or semi-Italian macaroni.
So let’s get to work, Slovenian boys, and widowers, so that this ripe fruit stays with us and in our midst. (Glas naroda 1934b)’
In these accounts, the sausage is invoked as a shorthand for Slovenian-ness itself, capable of condensing complex identities into a simple, tangible, and affectively charged object.
But the Kranjska sausage was not merely a culinary marker of Slovenian identity; it was also an object of explicit glorification. This becomes particularly evident in the writings of Peter Zgaga (Heartburn), who maintained a regular column in Glas naroda and who returned to the sausage with striking frequency. His references were not casual but suffused with pride and enthusiasm. “There is nothing to say above Kranjska sausage,” he declared, “and not only me, but women too, whether they are Carniolan or American, old or young, are of the same opinion” (Glas naroda 1922).
Elsewhere, reflecting on Christmas traditions, he asserted: “But in my humble opinion, there is no dish about Christmas that outweighs Slovenian potica and Kranjska sausage” (Glas naroda 1940a). Such formulations clearly placed the sausage on a symbolic pedestal, pairing it with potica — itself a canonical dish of Slovenian festive culture — and elevating both as national treasures.
The rhetoric of glorification was not confined to opinion columns. In the women’s section “For Our Housewives,” practical instructions for preparing Kranjska sausages began with the following emphatic claim: “Tell a Slovenian about Kranjska sausages and you’ll see him licking his lips. And why shouldn’t they, because no sausage in the world ‘beats’ Kranjska sausages, whether in quality, taste or whatever” (Edinost 1924). Here, a recipe was framed not merely as technical instruction but as a patriotic assertion of superiority, collapsing the boundary between the domestic sphere and nationalist discourse.
Humorous sketches and reminiscences similarly reinforced this glorifying logic. In a lighthearted “Memories” column, one reads:
‘As far as I am concerned, and as far as these “Memories” of mine are concerned, all that matters is that I acknowledge the fact that “Kranjska” sausages are, in fact, the best in the world. I mean, even in Paris, I saw Kranjska sausages advertised in the window of a delicatessen.
So they must be really good already, but they must also be modern. At least all the fashion comes from Paris. What is fashionable there is fashionable all over the world. So Kranjska sausages are the best and also the most fashionable in the world. (Amerikanski Slovenec 1928)’
From time to time, the Kranjska sausage also assumed the role of a metaphorical benchmark, deployed to designate what was “best” or “excellent” — and notably not only in the realm of food. As one columnist put it: “I tell you, dear Slovenians, that a Slovenian song, Kranjska sausage, and an American dollar, that’s something excellent” (Glas naroda, 1940b). In this formulation, the sausage is situated alongside two other potent symbols: the Slovenian song, representing cultural tradition, and the American dollar, representing economic survival and success. Together, the triad captured the migrant condition, where cultural continuity and economic opportunity were equally valorized, and where the Kranjska sausage symbolically mediated between them.
Letters from Slovenian soldiers serving in the US Army further illustrate this symbolic elasticity:
These Slovenian military songs are really beautiful, and it’s a pity that there is not a single Slovenian ‘matiček’ [another “typical” Slovenian name which is used as a generic expression for Slovenians] here among the American soldiers, and I have to sing or whistle our already modified songs myself. Of course, we have dozens of American ones and we sing them too, but there is nothing better than authentic Kranjska [Carniola song], just as there is no dish better than Kranjska sausage. (Enakopravnost 1941)
Yet, the Kranjska sausage was not merely a kind of “newspaper fata morgana” — a convenient trope with which columnists could embellish their prose, awaken national consciousness, or capture readers’ attention. As numerous reports from Slovenian settlements across the United States attest, the Kranjska sausage was an obligatory component of a wide range of festivities and community events, where it often played a central role. At picnics, dances, religious celebrations, or commemorations, it was not only consumed but staged: displayed, praised, and even glorified:
On 2 November, two JSKJ societies are organising a feast, and on 16 November, the Dom, when the “Kranjska sausages” will play the main role. (Glas naroda 1927)
So Slovenians, don’t forget this evening. There will be no shortage of Kranjska sausages and doughnuts. (Glas naroda 1930)
After the session, there was a jolly house party, with the famous Kranjska sausages playing a starring role. (Glasilo K.S.K. jednote 1931)
[I] hope that the service will be to everyone’s satisfaction and, naturally, that there will be no shortage of Styrian Potica and Kranjska sausages. (Glasilo K.S.K. jednote 1931)
There are many gifts for men and women, as well as many delicacies for our guests, namely Kranjska sausages and many other good things, which I cannot mention all here. (Prosveta 1926)
There will be no shortage of anything, we will also have a spit-roasted roast, and we will not do without Kranjska sausages, as is our custom. (Prosveta 1940)
There will also [be] the Polka dancing for the young and old during the afternoon (2 to 7 p. m.) And one of the highlights will be the Kranjska sausages and you’ve never tasted Kranjska sausages until you’ve tasted the ones that our excellent cooks make. (Prosveta 1926; originally in English)
On the evening of St Martin’s Day, 11 November, our Society is organising a social dinner party in the St Jerome’s Hall. We will prepare real Kranjska sausages and what you need to accompany them. We know that our countrymen love Kranjska sausages very much, and so do other nations. So just come and try them, even you from further afield, to see how we women from Strabane know how to prepare an authentic old Carniola dinner. (Glasilo K.S.K. jednote 1939)
Kranjska sausage was not merely obligatory or central components of a wide range of social gatherings; it also served as an instrument of communal integration. As one contemporary observer noted, “Slovenian Cleveland is like that, too. A hundred times they have blurred the sharp lines between this and that, and a hundred times they have blurred. Good wine and authentic Kranjska sausages blur all opposites” (Glas naroda 1937). This statement emphasizes the sausages’ role not only as a culinary staple but also as a mediator of social cohesion within the Slovenian diaspora.
Moreover, Kranjska sausages occupied a prominent place in the public visual culture of Slovenian-American communities. In accounts of Cleveland’s “Slovenian streets,” the sausages were frequently displayed in butcher shop windows, forming part of a material and symbolic landscape that marked ethnic identity: “You can see all sorts of old-fashioned Carniolian flowers in the various shop windows on Carry Ave. […] In the shop windows of our butchers, the most striking are the authentic Kranjska sausages made near Cleveland’s world-famous St. Clair Road” (Glasilo K.S.K. jednote 1923). The display of Kranjska sausages thus functioned as both a visual affirmation of Slovenian culinary heritage and a subtle marker of communal presence within the broader urban environment.
Kranjska sausages were also frequently positioned in relation to non-Slovenian, particularly American, foods, highlighting their role in constructing distinctions and asserting national identity. In the “Letter from a Slovenian Soldier,” for example, the sausages are contrasted with mainstream American provisions, reinforcing their status as a defining feature of Slovenian culinary culture in the diaspora:
Since the Slovenian soldier-writers serving in Uncle Sam’s army have been a bit quiet lately, I have decided to write a few lines so that no one will think that the German has eaten us. / […] Then I would like to thank all those who write to me repeatedly, especially the lady in Joliet who sent me for New Year’s Kranjska sausages and cake and a box of good “candy”, which smelled delicious to me. Slovenian girls are more practical than other American girls and they know where the soldier’s shoe fits. American girls send their boyfriends whole supplies of chocolates and sweets, but that does not compare with the Kranjska sausages and potica, as I am sure you will agree with me. I would also recommend to our other girls who have their ‘hobbies’ [boys] in the United States Army that they send them a Kranjska sausage or a piece of potica sometimes as a greeting. (Glas naroda 1918)
In this sense, Kranjska sausages operated simultaneously as a material and symbolic anchor: they were both a tangible part of everyday life and a marker of ethnic distinctiveness, linking mundane practices of consumption to broader processes of nationalist representation.
Kranjska sausages frequently functioned as markers of ethnic and national distinction, proving particularly effective in highlighting the perceived peculiarities and virtues of Slovenian identity. A correspondent from one Slovenian settlement articulated this in the context of courtship and domestic life:
A heartfelt advice to our Slovenian boys: choose Slovenian or Croatian girls rather than those cupcakes. Did you not see how feisty our girls were at the party? If you marry a cupcake, you must attend to her before work, visit her bed and say: ‘all right, honey,’ the breakfast is ready, the coffee is on the table, it awaits on the fireplace. But should you marry our countrywoman, she will come calling in the morning: ‘John, wake up now, the breakfast is ready.’ And the breakfast would not be an American pie or ‘canned beans’ or such rubbish, which one buys sealed in boxes. It will be Kranjska sausages wrapped in sauerkraut, [topped] by greasy žganci [a traditional Slovenian porridge-like dish made from buckwheat or cornmeal, similar to polenta]. (Amerikanski Slovenec 1926)
Here, Kranjska sausages operate as an emblem of authentic Slovenian domestic and culinary culture, standing in contrast to Americanized alternatives. Even in contexts where explicit glorification of national identity is absent, the sausages remain a constant reference point. For instance, another letter concerning Slovenian and American girls notes: “Recently [Peter Zgaga] wrote that there are no chubby and red-cheeked girls in America. He should come here and see what they are like. The girls here eat žganci, sauerkraut, and Kranjska sausages, and they don’t live on candy alone, as they do in some parts of America” (Glas naroda 1926).
Finally, Kranjska sausages are invoked even when discussions center on general qualities of meat or food, demonstrating their readiness as a cultural reference point. In all these examples, the sausages operate not merely as food, but as an accessible, tangible, and repeatedly mobilized symbol of Slovenian national identity within the diaspora.
In New York they sell frankfurters for thirty-five cents a pound. Because I have a discerning palate, I can at least roughly guess how much pork is in a pound of frankfurters, which is why I shudder to think what this year’s authentic Kranjska sausages will cost. (Glas naroda 1935)
Discussion (Intestines)
Glorification as Everyday Practice
How does a sausage become a site of national glorification? This seemingly banal question cuts to the heart of broader debates on nationalism and everyday life. As Anderson (2006) famously argued, nations are “imagined communities,” constituted not only by elite discourses or monumental events but by ordinary practices that allow members to experience simultaneity and collective belonging. Fox and Miller-Idriss (Reference Fox and Miller-Idriss2008) refine this perspective by demonstrating that nationalism is not only talked about but done: it is enacted in the routines of everyday life, through what they term “everyday nationhood.”
The case of the Kranjska sausage among Slovenian emigrants in the USA demonstrates that glorification — a concept usually reserved for official commemorations, state propaganda, or elite cultural production — can also emerge in quotidian spaces. Newspaper advertisements, festival announcements, humorous anecdotes, and reports of social gatherings all reveal how this culinary object was repeatedly celebrated, praised, and invested with symbolic significance. Importantly, glorification here was not confined to spectacular occasions but was woven into ordinary social interactions, from community picnics to family meals.
In this sense, glorification was less an episodic performance than an ongoing practice of symbolic elevation. Borrowing from Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1998), one might say that the Kranjska sausage was naturalized into the habitus of migrant Slovenians: an embodied disposition to consider the sausage as the quintessential expression of Slovenian culture. Each repetition reinforced its symbolic primacy, until it became difficult to imagine Slovenian-ness without it.
Performing the nation through food
Food, as anthropologists and historians have long shown, is an especially powerful medium of identity. Importantly, immigrant foods are not simply survivals of national traditions transplanted intact into a new setting. Scholars such as Gabaccia (Reference Gabaccia1998, Reference Gabaccia2000) and Diner (Reference Diner2001) have demonstrated that they are dynamic cultural practices, continually reshaped through processes of migration, adaptation, commercialization, and encounters with American markets and consumers.
Culinary objects, moreover, are not only ingested and digested; they are shared, exchanged, staged, and narrated. In this way, they condense cultural meanings while simultaneously mobilizing the body and the senses, binding together material practice, affect, and social imagination. Seen from this perspective, food becomes a key medium through which collective belonging is enacted and made tangible in everyday life.
Sutton (Reference Sutton2001) notes that eating provides a particularly intimate way of “doing memory,” linking the sensory with the social. In migrant contexts, this function is amplified: food becomes a bridge to the “old country,” a means of reproducing cultural boundaries, and a vehicle of nostalgia.
Kranjska sausage exemplified this dynamic in the Slovenian-American diaspora. In festivals reported in Prosveta or Glas naroda, the sausage was often highlighted as the centerpiece of communal gatherings. Advertisements not only promised their availability but framed it as an attraction in itself, an item worthy of anticipation and pride. The glorifying discourse was not metaphorical: it was staged in practice. Serving Kranjska sausage was an act of performing the nation, transforming an ordinary meal into a ritual of collective belonging.
Fox and Miller-Idriss (Reference Fox and Miller-Idriss2008) propose four modes of enacting nationalism: talking, choosing, consuming, and performing. The Kranjska sausage traversed all four. It was talked about at all sorts of events and in the press, chosen over other foods in migrant shops, consumed in collective rituals, and performed as a national emblem on stage and at the table alike. Its symbolic power thus emerged not from a single mode of enactment but from its cumulative interplay.
Materiality, embodiment, and the sensory nation
One risk in cultural histories of nationalism is overemphasizing discourse at the expense of materiality. The Kranjska sausage reminds us that nationalism is also enacted through objects, bodies, and senses. Migrants did not merely read about sausages; they prepared them, smelled their smoke, tasted their spice, and exchanged them at festive gatherings. As Holtzman (Reference Holtzman2006) observes, food provides a deeply sensorial mode of experiencing identity, anchoring abstract categories in visceral experience.
The material properties of the sausage contributed to its symbolic centrality. It was durable, easily transported, and suitable for communal preparation — qualities that made it ideal for picnics, feasts, and festivals. Its name, directly linked to the region of Carniola (Kranjska), further reinforced its representational power: to eat the sausage was to ingest the homeland. In this way, materiality and symbolism coalesced, producing what one might call a sensory nationalism.
Embodiment matters here. Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus highlights how repeated practices become inscribed in the body. For Slovenian migrants, the gestures of boiling, slicing, and sharing sausages were not merely culinary but national acts. Each bite inscribed Slovenian-ness into the body, reinforcing a lived sense of belonging that was as much gustatory as ideological.
The glorification of the Kranjska sausage must therefore be understood not only as a discursive act — as verbal celebration or what Mannur (Reference Mannur2009) terms “culinary fictions,” the imaginative constructions of diasporic populations — but also, and perhaps above all, as a material and embodied practice. Newspaper reports from festivals, correspondence from migrant settlements, and letters sent by Slovenians across the USA all testify to the sausage’s centrality in everyday communal life. Its glorification was not simply the project of editors and journalists; rather, it emerged as a broader social phenomenon, enacted and reinforced through the participation of migrants themselves. In this way, the Kranjska sausage functioned simultaneously as symbol, object, and practice — an edible locus of national belonging that united discourse with material and sensory experience.
Diaspora, difference, and the politics of dignity
National glorification in the diaspora cannot be understood apart from its relational context. Migrant communities did not exist in isolation but in interaction with American society and with other ethnic groups. As numerous studies have shown (Sirjamaki Reference Sirjamaki1946; Lubotina Reference Lubotina2015; LaVigne Reference LaVigne2017), Slovenians often occupied a low rung in the ethnic hierarchy of early twentieth-century America. In this context, glorifying the Kranjska sausage functioned as a politics of dignity: an assertion of cultural worth in the face of marginalization.
By celebrating the sausage as superior — tastier, healthier, more authentic — Slovenians symbolically inverted their social position. What they lacked in political power or economic prestige could be compensated for by cultural pride, articulated through food. This logic aligns with Hall’s (1991) argument that identities are always formed through difference: the glorification of Kranjska sausage presupposed comparison with American hot dogs, German bratwursts, or Italian salamis. To proclaim the Kranjska sausage as unsurpassed was to assert Slovenian distinctiveness within the crowded marketplace of immigrant identities.
At the same time, glorification also worked inward, reinforcing cohesion within the Slovenian community itself. Festivals and newspaper stories celebrated the sausage not only as a superior food but as a marker of unity. To eat it was to partake in Slovenian-ness, regardless of internal political or ideological divisions (Catholic, socialist, liberal).Footnote 4 Thus, the sausage functioned as a symbolic common denominator, a unifying emblem amid fragmentation.
In this sense, the Kranjska sausage served as both a boundary marker and a unifying emblem. Its glorification allowed migrants simultaneously to differentiate themselves from others and to consolidate internal solidarity. By doing so, Slovenian migrants were not only venerating a culinary relic of the homeland but also actively constructing a sense of home in the migrant present — what Hage (Reference Hage, Radstone and Schwarz2010, 417) calls “the feeling of being at home.” Through these practices, they articulated an idealized authenticity, a selective memory of their pre-migrant way of life, of the “good old days” (Sutton 2008, 170), pragmatically reworked to align with the material conditions and cultural norms of their new American environment.
Symbolic universality: Sausage as a hegemonic object
The symbolic status of the Kranjska sausage exemplifies what Laclau (Reference Laclau, Butler, Laclau and Žižek2000, 303) has described as the “hegemonic object”: a particular element that assumes the function of universal representation. As the numerous odes, praises, and festive invocations of the Kranjska sausage demonstrate, it was not merely an object of culinary nationalism but what Counihan (Reference Counihan2004) terms “culinary chauvinism,” a form of cultural narcissism in which pride in one’s own gastronomic achievements shades into arrogance or even intolerance toward the achievements of others. The sausage thus became a privileged site where national pride was condensed, exaggerated, and displayed.
Yet this symbolic elevation was neither automatic nor inevitable. Other Slovenian foods — potica, žganci, štruklji (traditional Slovenian rolled dumplings, made of dough with various fillings, prepared either boiled or baked) — were also cherished, but they rarely attained the same emblematic status. Part of the explanation lies in nomenclature: “Kranjska” explicitly anchored the sausage to Carniola, long imagined as the ethnically “purest” Slovenian province, and thereby endowed it with a representational power that other dishes lacked. Equally important was its performative suitability: the sausage was practical for large gatherings, easily displayed, easily consumed, and visually striking as a festive centerpiece. Repeated across festivals, advertisements, and press reports, these qualities enabled the sausage to acquire symbolic universality, coming to stand not merely for a dish but for a people.
This process highlights the dialectic of particularity and universality at the heart of nationalist representation. The sausage was a highly particular food — regional, material, and mundane. Yet through repeated acts of glorification, it was abstracted from its specificity and elevated to the status of emblem: pork and spice transformed into nation. In this way, the Kranjska sausage demonstrates how everyday objects, when celebrated and reiterated, can be transfigured into vehicles of collective identity.
From banal to celebratory: Waved and unwaved sausages
Billig’s (Reference Billig1995) distinction between “waved” and “unwaved” flags offers a useful heuristic here. Nationalism is most often reproduced through banal reminders — flags hanging unnoticed on public buildings, the casual use of pronouns such as “we.” In the diaspora, the Kranjska sausage frequently functioned as such an “unwaved flag”: a routine presence at gatherings, consumed without reflection yet continually reaffirming a sense of belonging. Its power lay not only in moments of veneration but also, and perhaps more crucially, in its very unproblematised normality.
At particular junctures, however — festivals, commemorations, newspaper editorials — the sausage was explicitly glorified, “waved” as the epitome of Slovenian pride. This oscillation between the banal and the celebratory was essential. Excessive overt glorification risked sounding artificial, while the absence of glorification altogether risked invisibility. The symbolic success of the Kranjska sausage thus resided in its dual capacity: to be both everyday food and exalted emblem, both habit and ritual.
The temporal dimension is equally significant. Over decades, the mundane repetition of consumption sedimented symbolic weight, enabling episodic acts of overt glorification to resonate with accumulated depth. Each festive ode or editorial praise drew its force from countless ordinary meals that had silently inscribed the sausage into the texture of community life. In this sense, the Kranjska sausage exemplifies how nationalism is sustained not only through spectacular rituals but through the slow accretion of meaning in the rhythms of daily practice.
Beyond culinary nationalism: Implications for theory
What broader lessons does the case of Kranjska sausage offer for the study of nationalism? First, it demonstrates that glorification is not confined to official or elite domains but permeates everyday life. Second, it shows how materiality and embodiment are central to the reproduction of nations, reminding us that nationalism is not only discursive but sensorial. Third, it highlights the role of diaspora contexts in amplifying practices of glorification, where marginality and difference can fuel intensified assertions of cultural pride.
More generally, the case invites us to rethink the relationship between banal and celebratory nationalism. Rather than distinct categories, they are best understood as interdependent modes that sustain one another. Everyday consumption prepares the ground for episodic glorification, while glorification retrospectively invests banality with symbolic meaning. The Kranjska sausage thus exemplifies nationalism’s dual life: ordinary and extraordinary, embodied and exalted.
Conclusion
In 1938, the lighthearted prose of Prosveta extolling the unrivaled quality of the Avella women’s Kranjska sausages seemed, at first glance, like mere promotional banter. Yet, as this study has shown, such glorifying rhetoric was neither incidental nor trivial. It exemplified a wider pattern in which the Kranjska sausage became an object of repeated elevation, pride, and celebration among Slovenian emigrants. The sausage’s symbolic career illustrates that glorification is not only the preserve of monuments, leaders, or textbooks but can also be enacted through the everyday practices of ordinary people.
The analysis of Slovenian-American newspapers between 1919 and 1945 revealed how glorification saturated the quotidian. References to sausage in festival announcements, humorous columns, or even advertisements continually framed it as a source of communal pride. Such practices blurred the line between the banal and the celebratory, oscillating between unconscious reinforcement of identity through consumption and explicit exaltation of the sausage as Slovenia’s culinary crown jewel. In doing so, they demonstrate how Billig’s (Reference Billig1995) banal nationalism and more spectacular, “waved” forms of nationalism are not discrete categories but mutually reinforcing modes of symbolic reproduction.
Foregrounding glorification as an analytic lens helps extend theories of everyday nationalism. Whereas much scholarship emphasizes implicit reproduction — linguistic routines, habitual identifications — this study draws attention to moments when ordinary actors overtly elevate symbols of the nation in everyday settings. Glorification, in this sense, is not reducible to propaganda from above but emerges “organically” in popular practices. Importantly, it is affectively charged: to proclaim the Kranjska sausage as “everyone’s weakness” was not only to describe taste but to articulate pride, superiority, and belonging.
The material and sensory qualities of the sausage were central to its symbolic resonance. Its portability, suitability for communal feasts, and evocative name linked directly to Carniola made it a “natural” candidate for elevation. Consuming, preparing, and joking about sausages allowed migrants to embody Slovenian-ness through their senses, inscribing national identity into the body. This embodied dimension underscores how nationalism is not solely discursive but also visceral, performed through taste, smell, and gesture.
At the same time, glorification functioned politically within the diaspora. In a context where Slovenians often occupied marginal positions in American ethnic hierarchies, the act of elevating their sausage amounted to a politics of dignity. To declare the Kranjska sausage superior to other immigrant foods was to symbolically invert social hierarchies and assert cultural worth. Here, glorification intersected with difference, constructing Slovenian identity in relation to others while simultaneously consolidating cohesion within the community.
The case of the Kranjska sausage, therefore, complicates the conventional division between elite and popular nationalism. If state institutions glorify the nation through ceremonies, statues, and heroic histories, migrant communities glorify it through sausages, festivals, and jokes. Both are forms of symbolic elevation, differing not in kind but in scale and medium. By examining glorification “from below,” this article underscores the need to consider ordinary practices and material culture as constitutive of nationalist projects.
More broadly, the findings suggest that glorification is a crucial but under-theorized modality of national reproduction. It operates at the intersection of affect, materiality, and performance, enabling ordinary people to participate actively in the production of national pride. To analyze glorification in everyday contexts — whether through food, dress, or ritual — is to recognize how nations are sustained not only by institutions but by the joyful exaggerations, humorous boasts, and sensory pleasures of daily life.
In the end, the Kranjska sausage reminds us that nations are not only imagined communities but also ingested ones. The laughter, anticipation, and satisfaction generated around a plate of sausages in Avella, Cleveland, or Chicago were not trivial diversions but everyday acts of glorification that bound communities together across distance. If monuments glorify the nation in stone, sausages glorify it in smoke and spice. Both are durable; both matter. The difference is that one feeds the body while the other feeds the gaze. To study nationalism in its fullness, we must attend to both.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Lucija Klun Turk and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Financial support
The Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency. J6-60098 and P5-0070.
Disclosure
None.
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