Sausages: An Anthology
thelionandunicorn.wordpress.com
thelionandunicorn.wordpress.com
I'm a big fan, the problem is a lot of them are highly processed, very fatty and massively salty.
During the last few years I was in the UK there was more choice of 'good' sausages though, 97-100% pork sausages (Heck and some other brands I now can't find), some lower salt/less processed ("Naked") and lower fat ("Porky Lights") options. But in the end none of them is really very good for you.
Which is a shame, because they are delicious.
I still haven't got used to the default sausage here in Australia being beef.
Of course, a lot of modern sausages are exactly like this. If you can, you want to get your sausages from a proper pork butcher. I can recommend Curtis in Lincoln UK, particularly (not surprisingly) their Lincolnshire sausages - pork flavoured with sage and pepper. Redhill Farm Shop just down the street is also good for sausages. I guess we (Lincoln residents) are lucky to have such high quality high quality food shops so close together!
My favorite are the duck and bacon sausages. They’ve also got some interesting ones like rattlesnake and rabbit and a vegetarian one called smoked apple sage with apple and yukon potatoes. They even used to have alligator sausages (those were real tough).
Their truffle fries and dipping sauces are to die for, too.
Would've been a good place for me to live as a young man as I grew up on sausage. The most common variety I ate was made by my Texan-Czech grandparents and other relatives. It often had venison and pork if someone had gone deer hunting recently enough. The venison was a nice touch but the pork helped it to be less dry. So delicious, and the archetype by which I measure all other sausage. The closest recipe I can find is from Prasek's Family Smokehouse in Hill (original Czech spelling is Prášek). They have multiple varieties, with and without jalapeño, but the all-beef and pork & beef have a flavor extremely close to the kind made by my relatives. I'm extra fortunate since you can now find them in HEB in Houston.
Most discombobulating.