By Chicago-land, I mean outside of the city itself. We shunned the city, though our community was only 2 miles west of it, with Cicero (Illinois) squeezed in between. Wisconsin is usually thought of as "sausage-haven", but the Czech and Polish butcher shops around Chicago beat them all, hands down. My hometown of Berwyn, with one main drag traversing it east to west, Cermak Rd., named after the Chicago mayor killed by a bullet intended for the President. Only 2 miles wide, there were along Cermak Rd., lemme think now: at least a dozen or more butcher shops, all mom & pop owned, no "big money" there. Starting at Lombard Ave. at the east end, going west, Shotola's Market, Jim's Butcher Shop, Vesely's, Mrs.Opat's Market, Toman's Meats, are a few I remember. I've been searching to find images of some of their wares with poor luck, so started the OP anyway. They specialized pretty much in sausage, though fresh meat was also most important. Meat was top of our list! At least 6 days a week,, in our house. Popped into my mind this evening, I asked my wife, she said she had seen it on her cooking channels, a sausage of great length, wound up in a spiral, kept in shape by a long wooden stick pierced through all the coils. A staple of the Czech butcher shops as I remember it! Everybody, even the Italians in the neighborhood, knew what "Jaternice" was, Jelita, too, and loved them! Jaternice (yither-nyee-tse) were light-colored skinny sausages about 8 inches long. Jelita (yell-ee-tha) were the same but dark-colored containing congealed, cooked blood (I didn't know that as a kid!). Before Christmas, every year, each shop made up a special offering called "Buchta", buchta normally being a raised-dough filled pastry, but here a buchta-shaped football-sized hunk of wonderfully tasty meat having a texture of being made from ground meats, all held together by some mysterious binder of "proprietary" nature! Meat buchta was the tastiest of all of them I remember, and every shop owner quickly picqued your interest by offering to slice off a sample! Also, before Christmas, an annually recurring radio-serial named "The Cinnamon Bear" aired daily at about 6PM, I think 15-minute segments, to which I glued myself to the big old Stromberg-Carlson table radion in the parlor every day. It was a wondrous life for a child growing up amidst old European traditions being kept alive in a new country having different directions. Frank
This may not be directly related but I am reminded of the Chinese ham that my mother used to buy for Christmas. It is a special kind of ham which is smoked, I think, and cooked in pineapple juice and then roasted. Sorry but that's just my impression of how that ham was made. It was so good that we always have that for our Christmas eve meal together with the traditional hot cocoa and bread. My mother would be in the store very early on December 24 to fall in line because the stock of ham usually run out before lunch time. When I got a family of our own, we moved to a rented house and it was a big surprise to learn that the owner of the ham store is a neighbor. And in a casual chat when I met her, I learned that they were selling more than a thousand ham (whole pig's leg) on December 24 and December 31. Until now, their ham is still a standout (although we seldom buy because we live far from that city).
I only remember one Polish butcher shop in Chicago. We came across it because my husband's aunt lived in an apt in the neighborhood. Trying to remember if she lived on Diversey Ave or Logan Square. She lived in two different places that I kind of remember but this Butcher shop had the best Polish sausage I've ever eaten in my whole life. I can still almost taste it after about 45 years.