Snorkers! Good oh!

Here’s a personal confession, I love sausages.  I like them fried, grilled or roasted. I like big fat ones, I like skinny chipolatas and I like square Lorne sausage cut in to slices.  I like them as part of a full English breakfast; I like them slow cooked in a kidney turbigo; or even as cocktail sausages served cold on little wooden sticks. Wrapped in bacon and cooked around the turkey, they are my favourite part of the entire Christmas lunch.  I would rather sit down to a good plate of sausages than a steak!

I am not talking here about chorizo, salami or kalberwurst, all of which are perfectly fine and have their own place in the food pantheon, but right now I am concentrating on the good old British banger.

Sausages are one of the oldest forms of processed food.  They were known to the ancient Greeks and also the ancient Chinese, and in Nero’s time there was even a Roman festival dedicated to sausages.  They have always been about making use of, shall we say, the less appetizing parts of an animal.  There is a famous story of President Theodore Roosevelt reading The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 muck-raking account of the Chicago meat packing industry, over breakfast one morning.  When he got to the part which describes what went into a sausage in those days, he got up and threw his sausage out of the White House window.

What's in a sausage?

Things have changed since then.  In fact Sinclair’s book was instrumental in bringing about America’s first Pure Food Laws.  However there is still an enormous variation in the quality of sausages.  Under European regulations enacted in to UK law in 2003, there are minimum quantities of meat stipulated for sausages. To be labeled as ‘Pork Sausages” for instance, the minimum is 42% pork meat, for other meats the minimum is only 32%, and for chicken sausages that may be as little as 26%.  The rest is usually made up of bread-rusks, vegetable protein or mechanically recovered meat (MRM), which is no longer classified as meat under EU law.

But wait! The EU definition of “meat” might surprise some people. Meat is now described as “skeletal muscle with naturally included or adherent fat and connective tissue” (that means rind, tendon, sinew, skin etc.)  There are separate regulations limiting the amounts of fat or connective tissue that may be included in “meat”.  So for example the meat in a pork sausage may be as much as 30% fat and 25% connective tissue. In other words the minimum amount of lean pork flesh in a “pork sausage” could legally be as little as 19%. (45% of 42%).  This, by the way, is a vast improvement on the old UK legislation and stands testament to how the meat industry has cleaned up its act significantly since the BSE scandal.

However, none of this means that sausages are bad.  The message is to buy good quality sausages from a reliable source.  A quick survey of my village shop revealed three brands of sausages on the shelves:

Richmond Irish Recipe Sausages  (£4.60 / Kg) contain 42% pork meat. Pork fat (10%) is separately listed as an ingredient.  That means that together with the 12.6% fat allowed under the “meat” label, they are potentially as much as 22.6% fat.  The ingredients also list rusk, vegetable protein and other additives.

Walls Thick Pork Sausages  (£5.01 / Kg) contain 61% pork meat and also list wheat rusk, pork fat and potato starch among the ingredients.

Lane Farm’s Brundish Pork Sausages  (£9.34 / Kg)  contain 80% pork meat.  These also carry the RSPCA’s Freedom Food mark providing assurances about how the pigs were reared.

 In fact, as a local (Suffolk based) business I can tell quite a lot about the origin of the meat, whereas Kerry Foods, which owns both the Walls and Richmond brands, refuses to state country of origin saying it would “add cost” and “jeopardize their brand position”. Say what?  Yes that's right, they are effectively saying that if they told us where their meat comes from it might be bad for business.  Draw your own conclusions.

By the way, as a point of comparison Tesco Value Pork Sausages (£1.06 / Kg) contain only 32% Pork

The facts of the matter are that mass-produced, factory made sausages are likely to contain less meat, poorer cuts, more fat and more additives than small scale, local produce.

Personally I would always recommend you buy sausages from your local butcher.  He more than likely makes them on the premises from meat which he butchers himself.  He will be happy to tell you where he gets his meat from and what he puts in his sausages, and tellingly, he probably eats his own product.

I checked this theory out at The Suffolk Butcher in Orford.  He offers a variety of flavours including plain pork sausages, but also innovative combinations such as ‘Pork & Ginger’, ‘Pork, Leek & Stilton’, ‘Pork and Apricot’, or ‘Hot and Spicy’.

“They are all made from the same basic pork sausage meat,” he tells me, “then I add whatever other ingredients I need.”  At this point he opens a number of plastic containers to show me dried ingredients, leeks, apricots and Stilton cheese.
“All our pork comes from Bramfield Meats in Halesworth,” (about 20 miles away). “I use only pork shoulder, about 85% visual, lean meat.  You’re welcome to come and watch if you like but you’ll need to get up early.  I make sausages at 07:00 a.m. every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.”  (The butcher is closed on Sunday and Monday and Wednesday is a half day.)

And the price?  £4.85/Kg.  It really doesn’t have to be expensive to eat well.

Richmond Irish Recipe

Ingredients

Pork (41%), Water, Pork Fat (10%), Rusk (Wheat), Potato Starch, Soya Protein Concentrate, Ingredients Less Than 2%: Salt, Flavourings, Stabilisers (Diphosphates), Guar Gum: Antioxidant: E300 & E307, Preservative: Sodium Metabisulphite, Colour: Cochineal.

Walls Thick Pork Sausages

Ingredients

Pork Belly (40.5%), Pork Shoulder (21%), Water, Rusk (Wheat), Pork Fat (3.5%), Potato Starch.
Ingredients Less Than 2%: Soya Protein Concentrate, Salt, Yeast Extract, Dextrose, Flavourings, Stabilisers (E450(i) and E450(iii)), Onion Powder, Preservative (E223), Spice Extracts, Antioxidants (E300 and E307), Herb Extract, Colour (Cochineal).

Lane Farm Brundish Pork Sausages

Ingredients:
Pork (80%), Water, Rusk, Salt, Flavour Enhancer E621, Preservative E223, Stabilisers E450 E451, Dextrose, Antioxidant, Spices, Herb extract.

Tesco Value Thick Sausages

Ingredients

Pork (32%), Water, Rusk (Wheat Flour; Salt), Pork Fat, Pork Rind, Potato Starch, Salt, Wheat Protein, Stabilisers (Tetrasodium Diphosphate, Disodium Diphosphate), Dextrose, Wheat Flour, Preservative (Sodium Metabisulphite), Antioxidant (Ascorbic Acid), Spice Extracts, Colour (Cochineal), Dried Herb.
Filled Into Non-UK Beef Protein Casing. 

Suffolk Butcher, Orford -  Pork Sausages

Ingredients:
Pork (85%) (lean shoulder cuts), Water, Rusk, Seasoning, Preservatives