[Sca-cooks] Terminology/substitute questions

[Terry Decker]

Mettwurst and Mettenden are probably closest to polony, which is a coarse 
sausage with various ingredients and spicing.  You'll find a number of 
recipes under various names, including belony and Bolognese.

For Grützwurst, look for farcimina in the Polish corpus.  Farcimina are 
sausages prepared with kasha.  To quote Dembinska, "The farcimina, according 
to Szymon Syrennius's discussions in connection with millit kasha, ' are 
used for stuffing blood sausages of pork and beef, having first been cooked 
in the fat.'  Farcimina appears in much earlier sources in a similar 
context, so there is little doubt as to what is meant by it."  (Syrennius, 
"Ksiegi pierwsze o ziolach rozmaitych," 1006.)  You might also check out 
Markham's pudding recipes where the pudding mixtures are stuffed into 
"farmes" (intestines) and cooked.  Apicius gives several recipes where spelt 
grits are used in sausage (farcimina).

Bear


----- Original Message ----- 
I'm still working on the Hanseatic cuisine text, and right now I've hit a 
snag. There are a number of things eaten today here that seem to go right 
back to Hansa times, but I have no clue a) what to call them in English and 
b) what kind of a substitute, if any, would be available in Britain or the 
US. Can anyone help?

Number one: Mettwurst. This is a smoked salamilike sausage, but the cut of 
the meat is fairly coarse and it includes a lot of fdat. It is traditionally 
seasoned with salt and whole peppercorns (modern versions also often include 
mustardseeds) and is smoked only mildly, so it is still rather moist and 
soft when served. Today, these come in various sizes and are eaten both as 
snacks and sliced on bread. An early sixteenth century source quotes a 
proverb saying "a mettwurst no longer than a limb (finger), those are short 
ends". I think that means they were usually longer than that, and cut or 
bitten off.

Anyways, what, if anything, do you call a sausage like that?

Number two: Mettenden. Much like the above, except extra fatty, extra salty, 
extra pepper, and designed to be boiled with cabbage or soup to give it 
flavour. A recipe from the 1570s says that sausages like this should be 
'boiled with a salad'.

Number three: Grützwurst. All I can go by is a single reference from a 15th 
century account book saying '(oat)meal for sausages' and a fifteenth century 
recipe describing how to make sausages green (parsley and eggs ground 
together, meal, meat and spices and 'make sausage' - presumably everyone 
knows how).  There is a tradition to this day to make a kind of boiled 
sausage with oat or barley meal in North Germany, called Grützwurst. A much 
more recent recipe (1897) describes the process of aking the modern kind: 
boiled oatmeal, blood, melted fat, water, flead cut into small bits and 
spices are loosely filled into a casing and boiled. The 'white' kind is made 
without blood, but with bacon fat.

I'm really at al loss here. The kind with blood sounds like black pudding, 
but the kind without blood (and including meat as well as fat) seems to have 
been the more common kind.

Does anyone understand what I'm trying to say?

YIS

Giano