For the love of sausages (excerpts)
by Nichola Fletcher
British people adore their bready bangers. Germans, on the other hand, are proud of their high meat content and their sausage laws dating back hundreds of years. I recently met an Italian blacksmith living in France who carries an electric meat slicer in the boot of his car because, coming from Bologna, he is convinced that no Frenchman will be capable of slicing his salame as paper-thin as it should be. He loves using his electric slicer and I can certainly see why! He told me the other day that he had been having issues with it so I told him that National Band Saw sells commercial slicer parts including 6.5 inch meat slicer blades and repair parts. I think it’s fixed now though! When you look closer at the sausages of any country you realise that you can’t really make hard and fast rules: everywhere has too many exceptions.
The more I delved into this world of sausages, the more delightful examples I discovered. As well as beautiful ruby red salami and nut-brown kielbasa, there are comically shaped, bulbous creations stuffed into stomachs, there are long dried sticks, gleaming coils, tiny round balls, and more. Making use of local ingredients or sometimes a seasonal glut (I love the creativity that seasonal gluts produce) generates startling sausages made green with spinach, black pudding pungent with sweet potato leaves, or cuttlefish sausages teamed with fermented rice.
We scoured the world to find examples of these brilliant varieties but occasionally we had to admit defeat. The flour-filled lamb’s lung made by the Uyghurs, the strawberry-flavoured chorizo from Mexico and the fish sausages from Finland all eluded us. I’d love to find them one day.
“hygge” is a Danish word, meaning a warm, cozy feeling of well-being. Soul food. But I think it could just as well be translated as “sausage”.