ithaca brunch sausage

Ithaca, NY. One grey October Sunday morning in 1999, I was shockingly out of supplies for breakfast. After an hour or so of mental dry-spinning - a consequence of my yawny hungry-ness - I fetched my coat and went down the hill to see where I’d find some food. First I meandered through the whole downtown without much success. When I finally entered the DeWitt mall, the cafe was just about to open, and completely empty.

Cafe DeWitt lies right across the world-famous Moosewood restaurant.

the country of kartoffelsalat

So I spent three days in Germany. Transportation logistics excluded proper restaurant visits, so I made the stay a wursty experience, in spite of my freshly triggered reservations about meat freshness. Sausage consumption began on Friday afternoon at the Göteborg bus terminal, where the Frankfurter & Cabanossy grill sells what I believe to be the best sausage to be bought anywhere in Sweden (as a touring musician, I’ve tested them all). I remember that their many kinds of sausages are made by an Austrian specialist - I don’t know whether this is still true, but the products are in any case better than what you get in the kiosk at the other end of the station. They also provide unsweetened German mustard, if you ask for it.

One cattle-shuttle flight trip later I found myself back in Frankfurt Hahn airport, a place lost in the countryside somewhere between Koblenz and Trier that has as little to do with Frankfurt as Berlin has with Hamburgers. Here I bought a dry slice of hot ham-cheese-something that kept me chewing until the bus to Koblenz arrived.

sausage production part II, things to avoid

Our first two batches of sausage in the freezer are diminishing at an alarming rate.

This is mainly due to the fact that the sage-flavored breakfast sausage goes so well together with the maple syrup that we brought back from Virginia in October, that the chestnut-white-wine sausage was a smaller batch and that the chorizo-flavored variety was a welcome addition to a larger quantity of Sauerkraut the other day. So I made sausages again.

At the shop, the cheaper pork chunks were gone, no shoulder, no sides. The butcher happened to be available after a few minutes, or rather after concluding a boxing and tickling episode with his young children

sausage production

An appropriate opening for this blog. Yesterday I bought a pile of pork sides and a few metres of casings. I ground half of the meat finely and the other half coarsely and spiced them up in various ways. Today, I created 2 kg sausages, most of which were directly confined to the freezer for later feasts.

This is no mere doodling or petty re-enacting of the ways of the olden days. Just take a look at the package of the sausages in the shop. It is possibly for reasons of tradition that the various kinds of Swedish sausages contain potato flakes (what are “potatisflingor” in English??) and sometimes sugar. Up to this point, my astonishment is just a marker of cultural differences and not really a quality judgment, although I don’t feel that a product with a meat content of some 70% ought to be called a “sausage”. In Sweden this would be korv in any case, so I should be content. I am much more concerned about those ingredients that all the sausages of the world contain.

Nitrites etc.: Julia Child (In From Julia Child’s Kitchen, p. 363-4) gives a nice short overview about how harmful a bite of sausage preserved in the traditional way (with nitrates) is likely to be. Not all that harmful, according to her. So perhaps adding nitrites would not be a major concern (or would it?), but since I now can freeze my sausages, I believe I’m more comfortable with just: salt.

Taste enhancers: the niche literature about the bad effects of sodium glutamate abounds, and of course, the normal customer cannot make head or tail of all the partly conflicting information. Let’s ask another question: what in the world can, in a pork sausage containing, say, 30% fat and a bunch of spices, go so wrong that taste enhancers are necessary at all? There must be some cheating going on someplace.