Sausage

When you think of a true American dish or meal you would almost certainly think of hot dogs.  You would be right to do so.  Hot dogs, or the more generalized sausage, have been on kettle grills in the back yards of American for the past fifty years.  The sausages we eat today are steeped in history, from being mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey to being enjoyed at every baseball game since Babe Ruth.  Sausage is an unique example of how ingenuity and a want for preserving food for future consumption, motivates many of mankind’s greatest accomplishments.

Sausage comes from the Latin salsica meaning too heavily salt.  The origin of its name implies what sausage was intended to do.  Sausage was a means of preserving meat for later.  By heavily salting pieces of chopped meat and putting them in tightly packed animal intestines with no air, bacteria would go nowhere near it.  Though the Greeks lay claim to the oldest mention of sausage in Homer’s Odyssey, the first recipe for it can be found in the oldest known cookbook.  “Apicus”, written sometime around 35 B.C. by Marcus Gavius Apicus mentions 16 recipes for sausage, the most popular of all of them being Lucanian sausage.  His recipe for Lucanian sausage called for ground meat, pepper, cumin, savory, parsley, nuts, and laurel berries to be put into intestines and put up to smoke.  Ending up in hard times, Apicus, believing that life was not worth living without fine food, killed himself by poisoning.  It is rumored that the fatal dose of poison was administered in a sausage.  The sausage technique migrated through all of the territories occupied by Rome.  This is why several of the most famous sausage lovers are from these regions.  

Sausage, in the form we know today, came to the Americas with the Europeans who settled here.  To this day the types of sausages popular with the people who settled the New World are still popular in the areas in which they settled.  For instance Cuba, Brazil, and Mexico all use the Spanish sausage Tereso in there cuisine.  New York and the areas around it, settled primarily by Northern Europeans, eat a lot of Kielbasa, Bratwurst, and Frankfurters.  Finally Canada and Louisiana settled by the French eat primarily Boudin and Andouille.  



From Hannah Glasse "The Art of Cookery" 1774

I believe in the 18^th century, sausage was very much based on family recipes and social rank.  Depending on the cut of meat used, the seasoning, or if you smoked, dried, boiled, or fried it.  Recipes from period cookbooks give a generalized look at what the sausage of the period looked and tasted like.  The primary flavorings of the late 18^th century for sausages were salt, pepper, and sage.  In the early 18^th century sage was still the most popular flavoring, but it was paired with parsley, and nutmeg.  The meat throughout the 18^th century remained constant.  The primary, or lean, cut seems to be the belly or bacon.  This was mixed with fat from pork or beef suet in a three part lean to one part fat mixture. 

All of the sausage mixture was then stuffed into casings.  The casings where called guts in all of the cookbook recipes and the gut they were referring to were most likely the inner fat lining of the large intestine.  The sausage was stuffed with a sausage stuffer - a long hollow tube with a spout, and a wooden plunger to push the ingredients into the intestines.  Another method was simply using a funnel.

 

 

Cooking methods varied, but the most popular forms of cooking came from the traditional use of sausage.  With the goal of preservation, you could smoke or dry the sausage. A combination of both was most popular. You could also boil or fry them.  Mary Randolph suggests taking the filling, to form them into patties, and fry them.

Sausage is a dish found in almost every culture in the world, but has the unique ability of adapting to the society in which it finds itself.  In America, our national dish seems to be one of diversity.  Think about every time that you have eaten a hot dog at a baseball game or at a fair.  Realize that every time you do, you are eating something that has been eaten by Roman Emperors and peasants alike.  In every country, every society, and in every social class, sausage has been enjoyed for centuries.  So whenever you eat your hot dog or bratwurst enjoy your unique taste of history.