typically a chopped meat mixture stuffed into a tubular casing. The concept no doubt originated in antiquity, when it was desirable to find some way of preserving the blood and minor bits and pieces of a pig, rather than have to eat them immediately after the annual killing; see haggis; blood sausages. But the method has proved to be so adaptable and successful that sausages have come to take many forms, and questions of definition and classification are complex.
To take definition first, meat is not a defining characteristic. Fish sausages have been known since antiquity. Glamorgan sausages contain neither flesh nor fish nor fowl, but cheese and leeks. Nor is the familiar tubular shape essential; sausages may be spherical or ovoid or flattish; and tubular sausages may be straight or curved or even circular. Finally sausage casings, or ‘skins’ (see below), are unnecessary. If sausage mixtures are shaped into cohesive rolls, for example, these count as sausages because of their shape and composition. To exemplify two areas of flexibility in one product, Scotland has Lorne sausages, which are square (Glaswegian, ‘squerr’) in section and without a casing.
As for classification, we must give thanks that sausages are not in the realm of natural history; for, if they were, the arguments conducted by rival taxonomists would be endless. The evolution of species and subspecies and hybrids of sausages proceeds so fast, and they proliferate around the world with so little control over their nomenclature, that they must always outstrip classification.
However, one can discern three major categories. First, fresh sausages (such as dominate the market in Britain) which are intended for cooking; second, cured sausages, containing raw meat and intended for keeping and slicing (e.g. most forms of salami); and third, cooked or part-cooked sausages which are meant to be sliced and eaten cold (mortadella) or heated and eaten hot (frankfurter).
The first two categories had already emerged in classical times. In Aristophanes' satirical play The Knights (424 bc) the real Athenian demagogue Cleon is seen off by an imaginary sausage-seller, ‘born and bred in the market, a brazen-faced rogue’ but a comic hero and an ideal politician, since he was prepared to ‘mince all policies, stuff (adding grease), dress up with butcher's sauce’. The playwright of Greek Sicily, Epicharmus (early 5th century bc), had even entitled a play The Sausage, but nothing else is known of it.
The ancient Greek sausage-seller represented a trade that made use of all that was left after prime meat (dealt in by butchers) had been eaten or sacrificed. Writing in the 2nd century ad, Athenaeus refers to the cooked-meat shops of Alexandria, which likewise specialized in sausages and all kinds of offal. There is little other evidence on how Greek sausages (allantes) were made, but we know that some, called khordai, were served sliced: perhaps these resembled salami.
In the Roman Empire two terms came into prominence that still survive. Apicius gives a recipe for the first, lucanica, a spicy, smoked, beef or pork sausage named after a region of S. Italy from which Roman troops had brought the recipe back to the capital. Lucanica (it is a moot point whether the term is singular or plural) are referred to by the 1st-century Roman poet Martial and are frequently mentioned in documents from the 4th century onwards. Modern descendants of the term lucanica include linguiça, longaniza, and luganega; most such descendants seem to be long, undivided smoked sausages. The second term is salsicia, from which many modern names are derived. This occurs in word lists from the later Empire, but there is no early recipe.
Both words originated in Latin but were also borrowed into Greek, replacing the terms mentioned earlier: this suggests that Roman sausage-making skills swept the board. Certainly there were several other Roman kinds: Petronius talks of tomacula sold hot at street stalls, but nothing is known of how they were prepared. An early Byzantine text, The Miracles of SS Cosmas and Damian, provides the first textual record of a string of sausages (seira salsikion).
The conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity posed problems for some sausages. Not only did many of them contain blood, whose consumption was forbidden by the Bible, but they were associated with pagan phallic rites. Nevertheless, sausages survived and were a common feature of the diet of medieval Europe. In contrast, little use was made of them in the Arab world. This was no doubt due to their links with the pig, which neither Muslims nor Jews were permitted to eat. They could have been made from other meats but in practice were not, and even in the modern Arab world there are still only a few kinds (notably the N. African merguez), whereas there are countless varieties of rissole and meatball.
In medieval Europe pork was certainly the meat most used in sausages, and pepper was the most common spice. But national and regional divergences were already apparent, some depending on the range of ingredients readily available, others on climate.
Broadly speaking, sausages for cooking and eating hot were found in northerly countries more than in the warmer Mediterranean region. And traditions of cured sausages were strongest in areas where a dry wind could be counted on to help with the cure. This factor gave an advantage to mountainous regions, for example in Spain, or countries where prevailing winds blew from the north and were not damp. Here damp countries like England were at a disadvantage. This may account for the failure of the English to produce a range of cured sausages to rival those of the Continent, and for the preference they have shown for fresh sausages.
Sausages which are cooked before sale are spread fairly evenly through the different climates of Europe, and indeed other parts of the world.
The divergences in the making and consumption of sausages were extended to the New World after Columbus. Spanish and Portuguese sausages invaded Latin America and the Philippines. In N. America the great sausage incursions took place later, with the arrival of German, Polish, Italian, and other immigrants in the 19th century. It would probably be true to say that in the latter part of the 19th century there was a wider diversity of sausages in the USA than anywhere else in the world, although for sheer number of types Germany would have been in the lead.
The 19th century also saw the rise of the mass production of sausages. A notable result of this was the introduction of bread into British sausages, a unique development (though a Roman recipe of Apicius also includes cereal).
Little need be said about fresh sausages, except that an unexpected ingredient in many recipes is ice. This is added to the meat used for sausages before the mixture is placed in a ‘bowl chopper’, a bowl which has a set of revolving blades at the bottom. It prevents overheating during the intense mechanical chopping and, in British sausages containing cereal, provides water which moistens the product. Chopping devices are favoured over mincers because the latter tend to crush the meat, squeezing out the juices.
It is in the preparation of cured sausages, preserved by salting, drying, smoking, and often some degree of fermentation, that science comes more into the picture.
Dried sausages intended for long keeping rely on good hygiene and traditional methods of preservation, which are finely adjusted to encourage the growth of a particular microflora in the product. Raw meat is generally used; it is diced, minced, or reduced to a paste as the recipe requires; mixed with salt, saltpetre, spices, and sometimes alcohol in the form of beer, wine, or brandy; and stuffed into the casings which are tied to make links of an appropriate size. A period of drying, usually in cool moving air, but sometimes over heat, follows; the sausage may lose up to 50 per cent in weight during this time. Most cured sausages are larger in diameter than fresh ones, since a very narrow sausage would dry excessively in storage. Some salami are bound with string, which may be tightened several times as the sausage dries and shrinks.
After several weeks of drying, the interior of a cured sausage will have undergone fermentation by lactic acid-producing bacteria present in the mixture; this gives the pleasantly acid flavour of many such products. The increased acidity, combined with the process of dehydration, and a fairly high salt content further raised by loss of water, take the sausage through a ‘preservation barrier’, from being a fresh, perishable product to a stable and durable one. A white ‘bloom’ of yeast cells is visible on the skin of certain varieties; they are harmless, and play a part in the maturing process. The sausage may also be smoked, introducing further preservatives in the form of phenols, which inhibit microbial growth. Hot-smoking also cooks the product to some extent.
Saltpetre, potassium nitrate, used originally because it contains as an impurity potassium nitrite which reacts with myoglobin in the meat to give a stable pink colour, has an important role in sausage-making, inhibiting the growth of many bacteria. In the past, when preservation was less well understood, toxic organisms sometimes infected sausages. The long keeping time, absence of oxygen, and inadequate acidity of a badly prepared sausage made it ideal for the growth of Clostridium botulinum, an organism now more commonly associated with canned foods, but which was first identified in sausages in Germany in the early 19th century: hence its name, from botulus, a form of the Latin word botellus, sausage. Modern mass-produced sausages, especially fresh types, often contain extra preservatives such as sodium metabisulphite and ascorbyl palmitate.
See also the sections below on sausages of Britain/France/Germany/Italy/Spain and Portugal. There are of course many sorts of sausage in other parts of the world, but most of these are variations on themes displayed in these five sections.
These are normally fresh types for cooking; they differ from the general run of such sausages in having a significant cereal content. This difference has only been visible since the latter part of the 19th century, when industrial production of sausages began and manufacturers, anxious to have a mass market, sought to keep costs down. The idea of combining meat with cereal in a sausage-like casing was by no means a new one. Haggis is an antique and excellent example of the combination. But up to this time English sausages had been like continental ones in being made more or less entirely of meat of some kind.
British pure pork sausages, similar to the French or Italian ones, are still made on a small scale, but the great majority of British sausages are made with rusk crumb or special ‘sausage meal’ (rather than the traditional breadcrumbs). The meat content of commercial sausages ranges from below 50 per cent to 95 per cent or more in the most expensive. Pork, or pork and beef, are considered best. Pure beef sausages are cheaper and are preferred in Scotland, where pork has been a less popular meat.
Traditional British sausages, all seasoned with pepper, usually black, and often with mace, include:
As one would expect in a country which stretches from the Mediterranean to the Pyrenees and the Atlantic coast, these are diverse.
A French fresh sausage is simply called saucisse, a term which often implies also a relatively small size. The commonest fresh types are saucisse de Toulouse, quite large, with an unusually high proportion of lean meat, and intended for grilling; and saucisse de Strasbourg, for poaching.
The general French term for large sausages, whether fresh, smoked, or cured, is saucisson. They are almost exclusively boiled. Indeed, the most common boiling sausage is simply called saucisson à cuire, although specific regional names exist in different parts of the country.
Small dried sausages (saucisses sèches) are less common than the larger ones (saucissons secs). Both are simply dried—never smoked—and eaten sliced without cooking. These, like the cooking sausages, are almost exclusively pure pork and are made throughout the country. Those from Lyons, and the neighbouring Beaujolais region, are particularly sought after. Several have surprising names. Rosette designates a saucisson sec made with the part of the intestine that terminates at the rectum (and is named because of its pinkish coloration). People in Lyons are also fond of Jésus, a fattish, banana-shaped saucisson sec which apparently derives its name from its resemblance to a baby in swaddling clothes.
Saucissons are rarely smoked, although fat saucisses sometimes are. The most famous smoked sausages in France are from the Franche-Comté, where numerous pork products are traditionally smoked. This is the saucisse de Morteau, a short but plump sausage which is to be poached and served hot with cabbage, lentils, or potatoes. It provides something of an exception to the general rule that a saucisse is smaller than a saucisson. It is roughly the size of a saucisson à cuire from Lyons.
See also andouille and andouillette; cervelas.
Reputed to number 1,000 or more, these deserve a book to themselves, and indeed have one famous one: Erich Lissner's Wurstologia (1939). In this and other works elaborate classifications are given, but in practice there are just three major categories.
This term means a parboiled sausage, made from finely chopped raw meat, not intended for keeping, usually scalded by the manufacturer, sometimes smoked, to be heated before serving, always sliceable, often red in colour. Examples are:
Raw sausage, for keeping, made from meat which has been cured, air dried, and sometimes smoked. A speciality of N. Germany. There are two types, spreadable and sliceable. The most common spreadable ones are:
Common sliceable ones include:
Fully cooked sausages, not necessarily intended for keeping, constitute the third main category. Here the most important type by far is:
The category also includes some sorts of blood sausage:
These include one outstandingly large and important family, the salami. This name (the plural of the Italian word salame) applies to matured raw meat slicing sausages made to recipes of Italian origin, either in that country or elsewhere. Within Italy there are scores of types.
Salami are mostly medium to large in size, and those made in Italy are usually dried without smoking. Characteristically, when cut across, they display a section which is pink or red with many small to medium-sized flecks of white fat. Pork, or mixtures of pork and beef or pork and vitellone (young beef), form the basis; seasonings and fineness or coarseness of cut vary to regional taste. Names denote style, a principal ingredient, or place of origin. These include:
Salami made in S. Italy and Sardinia are distinguished by their spiciness. They include:
All these belong to the class of salame crudo, raw salame. Salame cotto, cooked salame, is made from highly seasoned pork, or a mixture of meats not suitable for raw salame. It is cheaper than and generally inferior to raw salame. But the category includes mortadella, famous for being the largest of all sausages.
Of salami produced in other countries the most notable are those of Hungary; indeed the Italians themselves copy it as salame ungherese. It is a fine, hard, pork salame, lightly smoked and subtly spiced.
The Italian term for a small fresh sausage is salsiccia. This category includes Luganega, a famous fresh pork sausage of Lombardy, flavoured with cloves and cinnamon. This is usually unlinked and sold by the length rather than by weight. Anna del Conte (1989) traces it all the way back to a recipe of Apicius in classical Rome; but his recipe used different flavourings.
These two groups are treated together, because the sausages of the whole Iberian peninsula, and of the Balearics, can be regarded as constituting one family—and an important one, for representatives of it have become established in C. and S. America, parts of the USA where Spanish or Portuguese influences are felt, and the Philippines.
Alan Davidson was a distinguished author and publisher, and one of the world's best-known writers on fish and fish cookery. In 1975 he retired early from the diplomatic service—after serving in, among other places, Washington, Egypt, Tunisia, and Laos, where he was British Ambassador—to pursue a fruitful second career as a food historian and food writer extraordinaire. Among his popular books are Seafood of South-East Asia, North Atlantic Seafood, and Mediterranean Seafood. In 2003, shortly before his death, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contribution to European culture.
Andrews, Colman (1988), Catalan Cuisine, New York: Atheneum.
Mendel, Janet (1996), Traditional Spanish Cooking, Reading: Garnet Publishing.
