For the love of sausage

THE whole wide world, it seems, loves sausages.

Here in Ireland we eat about 15,200 tonnes of sausages every year but it’s not just the Irish and the Brits who have a passion for sausage – what would the Yanks do without their hotdogs, the French and Italian wouldn’t survive without their salami and salumi, the Spanish have got all of us hooked on chorizo and Germans boast over 1,200 varieties. The Chinese too have their favourites and of course we also love Moroccan merquez.

Polish cabanossi and wiejska sausages have been made for at least 5,000 years when the earliest written recipe was etched on a Sumerian clay tablet. Romans were also sausage enthusiasts and brought the art of stuffing chopped meat into casings to every corner of their vast empire.