[Sca-cooks] List of period sausage recipes

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:
>Old Marian replied to me with:
>>Stefan li Rous wrote:
>>>  Before, or along with such a list [of sausage recipes], I think you
>>>  need to define just what
>>>  you mean by "sausage" and what and what is not included. Is haggis a
>>>  sausage for this, for instance? Does it hav to be in a casing?
>>
>>Haggis *is* made in a casing -- it's just that the casing is a
>>stomach instead of an intestine.
>Okay, I should have been more specific and said "intestine" instead of casing.

I'd say in general, it _ought_ to be in a casing. Not necessarily 
small intestine, and not without exceptions. (See zampone, stuffed 
into a boned-out pig's foot and hock, or the ones stuffed into large 
intestines, or bologna, fer generic deity's sakes, stuffed into body 
parts polite people don't talk about. And that's not to mention 
artificial casings made of cloth or collagen.)

>  But I've often seen "sausage" at least today, sold without a casing, at all.

For the most part, I'd say this is adoption by extension. "Sausage" 
as an abbreviation for "Sausage Meat", the meat you stuff into 
sausages.

>  And I think I remember some medieval sausage-like recipes which 
>were stuffed into something besides the stomach or the intestine.

I assume so. They're out there.

>So, for this period sausage list, should it contain things like a haggis?

In my opinion, yes.

>  What is the difference between simply ground meat and sausage?

Traditionally, and, again, with some exceptions, sausages tend to 
differ from ordinary ground or chopped meat in three key areas I can 
think of: seasoning [the word "sausage" seems to derive from roots 
referring to salt, and it is arguable as to whether the sole purpose 
for the salt is preservative], fat content [fresh or dry, the fat 
both improves the texture of a sausage, adds fat to the diet of those 
that need it, central heating being a new thing, comparatively, and 
excludes air and therefore preserves], and the presence of a casing, 
which holds the meat together as it cooks or cures, keeps bugs and 
dust out of it, etc.

>  What is the dividing line between a pudding and a sausage, at least 
>for such a list?

I talked a little about this earlier, and the short answer (HAH!!!) 
is that there is no clear dividing line. If the terminology all came 
from the same language, animals all had the same body parts differing 
only in size, and climates and natural resources were the same all 
over the world, we'd have a hope of some sort of unilateral system of 
nomenclature and definition -- but we don't. It might also help if we 
had a universally and multi-culturally accepted (doubtless at some 
World Sausage Summit) sausage version of the Rheinheitsgebot, legally 
defining a sausage and what it can contain, but we don't ;-).

_IN GENERAL_, and as always, not without exceptions, sausages tend to 
be made from meat, fat (ideally from the same animal the meat comes 
from, but this isn't always so), salt and spices.

_IN GENERAL_, the sausagey entities we know as puddings (the 
derivation of this word not being helpfully designed by period 
etymologists to help us distinguish them from sausages, and this of 
course is our big problem, but it may or may not be, originally, a 
reference to guts), tend to have a significant non-meat content. So, 
for example, they may have everything a typical sausage has, plus 
blood, or they may contain fat, onions, grain and seasonings but no 
muscle meat. They may contain cream or eggs, or both, or a mixture of 
cooked and raw meats. Generally they tend to be less highly seasoned 
than the sausages from the same culture (which doesn't mean they're 
bland), possibly because they also tend to be made from the animal 
portions which don't preserve as well. For whatever reason, they 
tend, usually, not to be made to last as long as meat sausages. 
Whether this is because it's ultimately impossible, or simply not 
necessary, I can't say.

Again, I can't stress too highly the fact that every rule here has 
some exceptions, but think of yourself slaughtering a pig, and you 
want to use every last scrap. There's a description of this very 
thing in Le Menagier, or if you want photos there's always the 
Foxfire books showing the same thing, pretty much, and I'm pretty 
sure you've got it in the Florilegium, in fact.

Anyway, the point is you've got all this meat, and fat, and blood, 
and guts, and your plan is to turn all this into as much usable food 
as you possibly can. What do you do? After you've salted hams and put 
the salt pork up, you eventually have to deal with the small and 
large intestines, which get processed to deslime their interiors, 
washed free of blood, defatted, etc. You then make them into 
sausages. The meat types can be eaten fresh, of course, but they can 
also be kept for quite a while, so since you don't plan on a hunger 
strike in February and March (Lent notwithstanding -- okay, say 
December and January), you make your meat sausages to last. You 
dry-salt the stuffing mixture, or brine the finished sausages, and 
eventually hang them up to dry in the wind, the warm air near the 
fire, or in the smoke. You then still have intestines to use up, and 
some meats, things like liver, additional fat, blood, and maybe a 
spleen or some lungs, to deal with. From these you make puddings, 
which are either eaten immediately, or slightly dried in a cool 
place, to be eaten soon. Some of them respond well to preservation in 
rendered fat, and you can even salt pieces of liver or spleen, cook 
them in rendered fat, and pot them to exclude air (this process may 
not have been widely practiced in period).

In general, though, all I can really say for sure about the 
differences between sausages and puddings is that form follows 
function, which, in turn, follows form. If you know what I mean...

Adamantius

-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

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