There are not many phrases that offend me more than ‘pigs in blankets’. The correct name for this dish is, of course, kilted sausages. In fact, the bacon-wrapped cocktail sausage has many incorrect names: the Irish go with kilted soldiers while the Germans call them Bernese sausages. The Americans for some reason wrap hotdogs in croissant pastry and call them saucisson en croûte, as though they’re some kind of European delicacy, à la Escoffier.
Careful though, sometimes these deviations in name mask a greater sin. One Christmas, my posh nan promised ‘devils riding horseback’. I was thrilled for what I assumed must be the Nigella-fied version. Instead, she served baked prunes stuffed with almonds and wrapped in a sliver of bacon.
Preparing kilted sausages is the only part of my family’s Christmas lunch that I am allowed anywhere near. My method is simple: buy as many chipolatas and rashers of streaky bacon as supermarket etiquette allows, use the back of a blunt knife to stretch out the bacon to make it go further, wrap, cook… and enjoy. Then comes the traditional fridge raid on Christmas Day evening. My recommendation: cold roast potatoes, a pickled walnut, some smoked cheese and a leftover kilted sausage that has sat just long enough in the fridge that the exterior fat is beginning to turn white. It is a quartet without equal.
Like many of our favourite foods, no one can agree on where the kilted sausage came from. Asia can stake a claim – the first evidence of a bacon-like dish dates to 1500 bc China, where they were also wrapping fish in various other meats. Some have suggested that Anglo-Saxons stole the idea, replacing the fish with red meat. Others say the kilted sausage has Czech or German origins.
Pigs in blankets first appeared in print in a 1957 American recipe book for children by the cake-mix company Betty Crocker. There is a lively discussion among editors of the ‘Pigs in Blankets’ (grrr!) Wikipedia page as to who popularised the dish. One faction had argued that Delia Smith was the first modern patron in the 1990s. The debate was only settled when a Wiki editor watched the entirety of Delia’s 1990s output and concluded that the celebrity chef had only ventured as far as a ‘tightly wrapped bacon cooked on a skewer’. Delia lacked the decisive sausage.
Much like my late nan, marketeers can’t stop themselves from fiddling with an un-improvable recipe. They have brought us pigs in blankets sauce, pigs in blankets gravy granules, pigs in blankets dry roasted nuts, pigs in blankets crisps, an attempt at a pigs in blankets-flavoured ice cream and, perhaps most bizarrely, a pigs in blankets-flavoured vape.
According to Aldi, Brits will eat 668 million pigs in blankets this Christmas, or just over 11 per person. Londoners consume the most pigs in blankets – to my surprise, given many are banned from eating pork both by religion and fashion – at apparently nearly 14 per person. Bristolians, somewhat more predictably, let the country down with a meagre ration of eight per head. For my part, I’ll be doing my best to get Edinburgh into the top ten by consuming almost nothing but kilted sausages over the pigging-out period.
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