Return to Cumberland

I wouldn't be making sausages if I didn't love eating them. And long before I started making them I had discovered Cranston's Cumberland sausages. I first tasted this wonderful sausage on a New Year holiday in the Lake District while staying in the home of a friend and taking their advice on which local produce to try. The sausage was a revelation to eat - thick, meaty and spicy. This was the best British sausage I could remember eating. A sausage epiphany! I realised that the Cumberland sausage sold in supermarkets is a poor imitation of the original. It's a joke that national retailers twist a boring sausage into a spiral and call it a Cumberland sausage; they are just trading on the good name of the real thing. Unfortunately, this is fairly typical of national retailing attitudes to food in this country.

A few years later, I was delighted when I saw that the Cumberland Sausage had won Protected Geographical Status (PGS). But I was less delighted to find out that the details of the PGS registration are only for the name 'Traditional Cumberland Sausage'. The supermarkets can still sell their boring twirls as Cumberland Sausage without declaring them Traditional. I guess that the case for the PGS wasn't helped by the extinction of the Cumberland pig in the 1960's or that the local butchers couldn't agree on how the sausage should be spiced. I've now tried a few Cumberland varieties and they can be very different.

Via the internet I found that I could order Cumberland sausages on-line. A few years  later I found another Cranston's shop in Carlisle, while visiting my girlfriend's parents. It was rare that my freezer didn't have a good stock of my favourite sausages - buying these large coils of meat and chopping them into individual portions.

Now that I make my own sausages, freezer space is at a premium. Yesterday I found my last portion of Cumberland sausage, buried under a stack of home-made Paysanne and Chorizo. I decided to finish them off and it wasn't long before I had that wonderful smell filling the kitchen. Of course they were delicious, but my perception has changed since I have been eating my own-made sausages. What once tasted so delectably meaty now seemed somewhat spongy. Yes, they use coarser ground meat than the regular sausages on sale in the supermarket. Yes they have a higher meat content than the average British banger. But still, I think it is the addition of rusk makes it now seem bready and slightly spongy.

I read recently of another respected sausage producer in the UK making Toulouse sausages and adding breadcrumbs to give it 'the texture that the British public expects'. Until recently, that was the texture that I expected and I can't help thinking that these meat-only sausages, while utterly delicious, have turned me into a whinger about my nation's home-grown products. So three cheers for the Continentalisation of the British palate. Some day all sausages will be made with nothing but meat and spice. Anything else is just stuffing.