An Extremely Serious Sausage

Well folks, remember we are looking back at an unimaginable age without refrigeration. And you know how quickly meat spoils when it is not kept cold. So let us hold our noses and look back some thousands of years. Oh yes. Sausages are mentioned in The Odyssey which was written by Homer more than 2,700 years ago, likely while he was chewing on a tough sausage thousands of years older than that.

Sausages are even older than ancient Greece or Rome – the Sumerians (modern day Iraq) made sausages 5,000 years ago, probably from their enemies. Just grind them up and stuff them in a casing. Eat your enemies, with pleasure (did they even have mustard?)

One way they preserved meat in ancient times was to dry it so the bacteria would have no medium (water) to multiply in. That’s what we call ‘beef jerky’ today. ‘Who you callin’ a jerk?’ (Pipe down) Cowboys used to jerk their meat every night so they could eat it while on the trail.

Another way to preserve and transport meat is to make it into sausage, where you can disguise the rotten smell with spices and vegetables and other powerful aromas, all packed together in an air-tight and odorless casing.

Ah, the ‘casing’! That is what holds together all the bits and pieces. Get this: ‘Typically, a sausage is formed in a casing traditionally made from intestine, but sometimes synthetic.’ So before you even get to the tasty party you’re gnawing on an animal’s tough gut. Don’t worry though: the beast that gave you the casing is playing his harp in heaven.

If the animated picture looks a teeny bit naughty to you it’s all right – part of the FUN of the sausage is its naughtiness: sausage jokes, puns and allusions are as old as sausages (and smell about as corny).

And indeed there is nothing more Germanic than the mighty sausage.

So what historically was inside the mysterious bulge?

As mentioned above, STRONG and POWERFUL-SMELLING herbs and spices, so you wouldn’t (ahem) get nauseated at the p*o*n*g of rotting meat. And if you were Dutch you can be proud of all the riches of the Indies that got ripped off – cloves and peppercorns in an era when a kilogram of pure spice was worth more than a kilo of gold. Sailors on the ships coming out from the Netherlands to the Indies had no pockets on their overalls, to prevent them from stealing and smuggling in a couple of cloves. Man could get rich on that – earn more from that than he’s paid for his sea journey.

Now if you have not lost your appetite completely let us visit ancient Rome: ‘During the early days of the Empire, Romans mixed fresh pork with finely chopped white pine nuts, cumin seed, bay leaves and black pepper’, all, you will note, dear reader, POWERFULLY-SMELLING foodstuffs, so you wouldn’t gag as you gulped down the half-rotten meat. That’s the sausage for you: hidden pleasures indeed.
Today we are hygienic guys and gals, meat is kept fresh in the freezer; there are infinite varieties of sausage – amazed are the visitors when they see it even complements pizza.

Well, if you still insist on knowing what you are eating (then you shouldn’t be eating sausage maybe…)

A sausage consists of meat, cut into pieces or ground, and filled into a casing, with other ingredients. Ingredients may include a cheap starch filler such as breadcrumbs, seasoning and flavorings such as spices, and sometimes others. The meat may be from any animal, but is often pork, beef, or veal. But you never know: there could be old mattresses, hooves, roadkill, sawdust, moon rocks and even hunks of the vanished Judge Crater.