Old World Sausage

The old world, or old country, for many people means a place where their ancestors came from. The majority of Americans came from some far off distant land in search of something new. However, despite the new atmosphere many people continued carry on their ethnic heritage through food. Not only did food from the old world remind people of the place they came from, but also of a former and a more gracious period when things were a little simpler. Many foods can be traced to a certain place and ethnicity, such as desserts and side dishes, but most especially meats. While meat is used many different ways to create classic unique main dishes one style of meat has been carried down through the generation and remains to be popular, sausage.

Making sausage can be an intense processing starting with a quality cut of meat and grinding it down to the preferred chunkiness or smoothness. Different grinding sizes will produce a slightly different flavor. Then spices need to be chosen and weight to be proportional with the amount of ground meat. When making a dried or smoked sausage a cure needs to be added while fresh sausage need to be cooked before consumption. Next a casing needs to be chosen. There are both artificial casings and natural casing. A lot of people prefer the snap of a sausage with natural casing along because of the added flavor from the casing which is commandingly absent in artificial casing sausages. However, both are used the same way and yield the same amount of sausage. Then lastly the sausage either has to be cooked, dried, or smoked before it can be eaten.
In spite of the time and effort that goes into making sausage it has been made since 600-500 BC in China, Rome and Greece. Early civilization originally developed sausage to preserve and transport meat then discovered that dried berries and spices added to the meat improved the flavor of the sausage. Not only was sausage and sausage making techniques important for human survival during this time, but so was the mind set of using every part of the animal and not letting anything go to waste. From this mind set unique sausages arose, such as blood sausage and head cheese. Both of these sausages do not have a specific geological origin and can be traced to multiple areas throughout Europe and Asia. There are also a variety of different names which both of these sausages can be call which depends on the area. For example, blood sausage is generally used in the United States while blood pudding is used in Great Britain, boudin in France, and morcilla in Spain. Head cheese is used in America, but in England it is called brawn, in Germany Sulze, in Brazil Queijo de Porco, and in Hungary disznósajt.
Despite a variety of names the bottom line is that no one wanted waste any nutrients that were in every part of an animal. For blood sausage the blood of pigs or cattle was normally collected and cooked with a filler, such as meat, barley, or oatmeal until it was thick enough to congeal when cooled. Some blood sausages also contain raisins making the sausage sweet, sweet blood sausage. Head cheese was developed with the same mind set and is in fact not a cheese, but rather meat from the head of cattle or pigs that has been cleaned; all of the organs have been removed, and simmered. This produces a gelatin from the marrow of the skull. The head cheese will also contain any incidental meat that came off of the head during the simmering process.