Cure and simple

Flavoursome and flourishing, the British air-dried sausage offering is catching up with its Continental counterparts

- Tom Parker Bowles

THE English larder is rather bare when it comes to dried and smoked sausages,’ notes Jan Davison in English Sausages. She has a point because, although we’re masters of the fresh —Cumberland and chipolata, Newmarket, Lincolnshire and Oxford, not to mention a glut of puddings: black, white and hog—we are somewhat lacking when it comes to anything preserved. The French have their saucisson sec, the Italians their salami and the Spanish their chorizo. Not forgetting Polish kielbasa, German wurst and 1,000 other delectable European variations on this highly exalted art.

Ok, so cold, wet weather is hardly ideal for air-dried sausages. In the parts of southern Europe where they do these things best, conditions are rather dryer. But that doesn’t explain why other northern European countries, with a similar climate to us, are enthusiastic smokers of sausage. Perhaps, as Ms Davison argues, ‘the English enthusiasm for preserving so much of the pig salted as bacon and hams left relatively little to preserve as sausages’.

In fact, our sole contribution to the smoked sausage sub-genre is the saveloy, luridly red and faintly obscene, the battered mainstay of chippies. A descendant of the French Cervelas de Lyon, a ‘smoked, thick-set sausage from the noisy auberges of 16th-century Paris’, it bears scant resemblance to its ancestor; in fact, you never want to think too deeply about what’s contained within. ‘A slurry-filled condom,’ in the words of that great critic Jonathan Meades.

Six of the best producers of air-dried sausages