99 Station Street

Sausages, how they should be.

In the food section of The Times today was a main feature on sausages and their health properties. Apparently a large cancer research foundation and Harvard found  increased risks to health caused by the eating of the humble sausage. In one study it was concluded that the increase of 20% in instances of bowel cancer could be attributed to eating one sausage per day. They blamed this on the chemicals, the fats and additional preservatives and salts used in the manufacture of sausage. Sadly due to The Times adopting their subscription only online version, I can’t provide you a link.

In previous articles we have looked at the manufacture of sausages and how a proper home-made, hand crafted sausage should be put together. In defence of this great British tradition, it must be said like any other tasty treat, we should not overindulge. If sausage made from decent cuts of the animal, with natural fellows and minimum preservatives and chemicals bound in a natural casing or even a synthetic casing will hold few perils for the occasional feast.

The astounding part of this article was that anything up to 5% of sausage could be derived from chemical, a minimum meat content, dependent on the meat, can be as low as 42 percent, with meat being a very subjective term.

As many of you know how we like our sausages, we make our own sausages, we sometimes even smoke sausages and recently we have started experimenting with our own range of salami and other charcuterie. Like much of British food, there has been a revival and we hope to see the Great, British sausage brought out as a true hero of our nation’s culinary heritage. When you pass by those sordid pink slurry filled plastic fingers in the fridges and freezers of this nations mass sellers, compare those to the often excellent sausages produced by smaller caring producers. Some supermarkets stock such things and they are worth hunting down.

Think … Bangers or Trash ?