Who first thought of grinding up all those little unused odds and sods from an animal carcass and stuffing them into a bit of intestine? Many people, apparently. Sausages are one of those products which, while seemingly not intuitive, emerged independently all around the world thousands of years ago.
As far as we can tell, sausages have been produced since we began butchering animals. The first record of sausage-making is from around 2,000 bc: an Akkadian cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia mentions intestines filled with forcemeat. Sausages feature in The Odyssey as a simile for Odysseus tossing and turning in bed (‘When a man besides a great fire has filled a sausage with fat and blood and turns it this way and that and is very eager to get it quickly roasted’). And in Aristophanes’s comedy The Knights a sausage seller is elected leader because his skills translate well to the art of politics: ‘Mix and knead together all the state business as you do for your sausages.’
The Romans brought sausages to Britain, and our word ‘sausage’ comes from the Latin for ‘salt’, which makes sense, as sausages probably began as a form of preservation. Around the world, sausages are often smoked or cured, but in the UK, our heritage sausages tend to be raw. The character of British sausages comes principally from their use of rusk alongside the lean meat and fat and spices. The rusk soaks up juices as the sausage cooks, retaining the sausage shape and making the sausage succulent. The ‘banger’ came about during the periods of rationing around the world wars, when sausages had higher water content, which would cause them to explode in the pan with a bang. Historian Diane Purkiss identifies a hyper-regionality: ‘British sausages are the island equivalent of cheese in France… they are du terroir.’ Today, Britain is thought to produce more than 400 different types of sausages.
Bismarck supposedly once compared laws and sausages: it is better not to see them being made. Although probably misattributed, the sentiment perseveres: many fear what lies beneath the sausage casing. But seeing the sausage made – a good sausage – is actually a beautiful thing: the lean and the fat ground first separately and then together, the meat piped into a seemingly endless tube, before being deftly separated into links and hand-knitted into bunches.
When it comes to the sausage’s reputation, mechanically recovered meat (MRM) has a lot to answer for. MRM is the paste which can be collected from carcasses when they’re pressure blasted after the decent cuts have been removed, and it was widely used in budget sausages in the 1970s and 1980s. The result is what Jonathan Meades called ‘abattoir slurry in a condom’. Today, any MRM has to be declared on the label and doesn’t count towards the meat content.
Those who know exactly how the sausage gets made are in crisis. Andrew Keble, who runs sausage company Heck, reckons that sausage supply is being strangled by Gen Z’s reluctance to get their hands dirty. The younger generation, he says, can’t handle working in a factory because they want to work from home, despite good wages and working conditions. Companies such as his are investing in automation, but are still stymied by a lack of workforce. Is this the way the sausage ends? Not with a banger but a whimper.
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