A Short History of the Sausage

Today, we are gonna talk about...

Ancient sausage recipes, cooking techniques and the history of sausage!

Everyone's different, but we all love sausages!

Greeks eat it, Italians eat, Germans, Spanish, Polish British, Portuguese ...

There is, even, a sausage party in Taiwan Taipei...

There are sausages in China, the "Lap Cheong" a smoked pork sausage, sometimes flavoured with rose water, or rice wine.... The "Yun Chang" a duck liver sausage...Greeks eat "loukanika" that as ever other culture has ,they too have plenty of different flavours and varieties, but two prominent ones are pork meat sausages mixed with orange peel and fennel or smoked pork and leek sausages...

One of the most famous regions in antiquity for its smoked sausages, was a region in southern Italy near to what we call the "heel" of italy. The area was Lucania the land of the Lucani people...They were probably making the best smoked sausages in Italy and eastern mediterranean...

Hence the ancient and modern name in Greek for sausage is loukaniko/ loukanika in plural. 

The method of making the smoked sausages was brought to Rome possibly by the soldiers of the late Roman republic who had served in Southern Italy. Apicius gives us the first surviving written recipe for smoked sausages and the word is first recorded in Greek in a 4th century CE papyri, and in the joke book Philogelos. (The oldest existing collection of jokes) 

The world is familiar today form end to end of the Mediterranean and far beyond. Southern Italy, Greece, in Cyprus, in Bulgaria, In Turkey we have sutzuk...In Portugal and Brazil as "linguica", and in Spain as "Longaniza"...

And this is the magic that is almost in every culture; the sausages had to be salted, smoked , preserved, here we have loads of different techniques, but very similar yet unique techniques on how to make sausages. 

Back to ancient Greece and Rome. We have the book of Apicius - a recipe book that survives to this day from the 1st century CE - that makes it roughly 2000 years old. A book written by a the Roman Marcus Gavius Apicius a gourmet and lover of luxury - or at least the collection of recipes is attributed to him...! It includes a lot of recipes and techniques and ingredients found in ancient Greece too and they were common to both cultures too! 

We can imagine the Roman soldiers, mingling with the local population, or getting to know the local ladies, and getting drunk with the local wine, while eating the famous smoked sausages and then brought back to Rome the technique on how do them. 

Lucanicae were traditionally smoked above the fireplace and not otherwise cook. 

So cooks and wives will hang them for 2-3 days near the fireplace and with the fire burning more or less continuously - as people needed to heat their homes and cook too - the sausages will dry and simultaneously get infused with the smoke from the family hearth.

This lovely recipe of course doesn't contain enough quantities and enough detailed instructions to tell the modern cook how do to it. Luckily many before me, and including me have attempted it a few times and managed to write down some quantities for the ingredients which will help you recreate the recipe at home! 

BONUS sausage knowledge!

Polony sausage

 A soft-textured English large smoked sausage typically made of pork and beef. Polony is usually sold encased in a vividly hued skin of either orange or red. Polony sausage is similar to bologna so its name suggests that “polony” might have been brought from “Bologna,” the Italian city known for this style of sausage. Typically sliced and served cold. I'll post a picture below

 ...and Tewksbury Mustard! What better condiment for a sausage than mustard huh? 

According to history myth and legend: 

"Tewkesbury Mustard Balls covered in gold leaf were presented to Henry VIII when he visited Tewkesbury in 1535. A condiment fit for a king!

Ancient Music composed by Pavlos Kapralos, except from "Epitaph of Seikilos" the oldest surviving fragment of music from the ancient world, performed by Pavlos Kapralos.