Sausages

Originally the content of this post was supposed to be incorporated into another, but I figured that the resultant post would have been too long, so I thought that it would be better if I split it. Before I left for London, my mother strongly advised me against eating British sausages at all. And this despite the fact that sausages are an integral, if not important, part of British cuisine, being present in bangers and mash and the full English breakfast, just to name a few. Given its significance, I think I am obliged to dedicate a post to the typical British sausage. Besides which, I've already had the occasional sausage while here.

She did have reason for her warning though. The last time she was in the UK, she bought a pack of Tesco value sausages to feed us. She was used to the idea of boiling sausages, having worked mostly with frankfurters, so you could imagine her horror when she started boiling the Tesco sausages.

EU regulations dictate that the label 'Pork Sausage' can only be used if the sausage contains at least 42% pork. Since the Sainsbury's Basics Sausages only contain 32% porcine flesh, they have to be labelled as just 'Sausages'. For our non-British readers who are less familiar with things here, the rest of the sausage is made up of water and Butcher's rusk, a wheat-based food additive, and related to the rusk biscuits given to babies. In particular, water was responsible for the popular term banger, since during World War II, water was added to sausages to make up for the scarcity of meat, leading to sausages of that era exploding when cooked.

For this post, I cooked two sausages with two different methods to supplement our household dinner. Since the grill function in our oven is faulty, I resorted to baking one of the sausages. The other sausage will be boiled, to recreate what my mother encountered.

Note the large number of fat globules in the water.

Due to the poor meat content, the sausages were unbearable to eat, reminding one somewhat like greasy chewable rubber. Taste was bland, almost indiscernible. These might be cheap, but perhaps not worth the displeasure of going through them. Still, these are somewhat similar in meat content to the hot dogs featured in Allegra McEvedy's Hot Dog Hotpot (She of Economy Gastronomy fame), and so, a knockoff is in order!

Description	Price per Unit	No. of servings	Trade-up Premium	Trade-up Benefits
Sausages	£0.48	8 links	+£0.49	Almost twice the meat content. Skip both and go for the more premium brands for health and culinary reasons.