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.

Morcilla

150g dried pig blood
900 ml water
500g hard pork back fat
400g dry Arborio rice, cooked
100g onion, fine chopped
10g garlic, crushed
5g thyme
10g Pimentón (sweet smoked paprika)
50g salt
5g black pepper
beef runners

Making Morcilla (Spanish black pudding) is a big deal for me. I have been a fan of blood sausage for a long time now and it's the texture I love as much as the taste. I also warm to the 'waste no part of the animal' attitude of its origins. It's an odd journey for someone like me, raised to eat neither pork nor blood products. I wonder if there are other Jewish black-pudding fans out there? Maybe we should start a club. Or a support group?

This is a different type of product to a fresh meat sausage so for me it represents yet another new branch of my sausage-making experiences. Like Boudin Blanc, Morcilla is a pre-cooked sausage. These spent an hour and 20 minutes poaching in water at 80 degrees C. I am going to have to get a bigger pot for this kind of thing, as my largest pot is a domestic pressure-cooker base and it could barely cope with the load.

Again, I chose to use a recipe from The Sausage Book. I have seen other recipes for making blood sausage that use just a funnel, nozzle and ladle to get the blood mixture into the casings. No stuffer required. But with this recipe, the rice gives the pre-cooked sausage a firm rather than a runny texture such that a sausage stuffer is needed to get the mixture into the casings. The rice is not noticeable in the finished sausage which has a light and fluffy-yet-sticky texture; something that I enjoy about black pudding.

My biggest problem came with tying off the links. These need to be tied off with string rather than just twisting the casing like a regular sausage. This is partly because the mixture is more runny than sausage meat and also the beef runners are thicker walled than hog casings and more likely to open. I tried to use lightweight cooking twine but it was not up to the job and kept breaking. The result was that one of my puddings spilled its contents into the poaching pan. A terrible loss. Next time I will invest in some butchers' string and tie them off properly.

I don't know if the thyme is right in this recipe. There is not enough to make a difference to taste, so next time I will either leave it out or increase the quantity. Maybe some rosemary would work well along side it.

This is the first time that I got to use beef runners to make sausage. I have enough left for another batch and then I will try using beef middles to see the difference in size and shape it produces.

Fresh Chorizo

2.2kg pork belly
40g salt
20g garlic
50g paprika
hog casings

This is fresh chorizo, not the cured stuff. So it's just paprika and garlic flavoured sausage, but it's also the best sausage that I have made to date. For the meat, I bought a 'hand of pork' from my local butcher, Gog Magog Hills, and the meat is fantastic.

The new sausage stuffer performed incredibly well. It produced a beautifully even sausage that was easy to fill and without any wasted mixture. The meat is a little on the lean side so the sausage has quite a firm texture. I like this. I suspect that the large amount of paprika used in this recipe also contributes to the sausages' solidity.

Stuffer Upgrade

When I started making sausages I bought myself the cheapest mincer/stuffer I could find, just in case I only wanted to use it a few times and call it a day. I chose a KitchenKraft model and it worked just fine, once I learned it's little quirks.

The suction base comes loose quite easily, so I have to regularly reseat it on the worktop. It's easier to do this before it comes free, just as it starts to loose its grip. When stuffing the sausage, you need three hands - one to turn the handle, one to press the meat into the stuffer, and one to regulate the rate of mixture filling the casing.

So for a better sausage-stuffing experience, and hopefully a better sausage, I have now bought a Pro-V 3L Stainless Steel Stuffer from Franco's Famous SausageMaking.org.

When my new stuffer arrived I was taken aback by how big this was. 3 litres is a large capacity. I was worried that in my haste to upgrade I had bought something too big for domestic use. But my doubts vanished once I put the new stuffer to use.

The stuffer is made from heavy stainless steel so it doesn't budge when I turn the handle and I don't need that extra hand to push down on the sausage mixture. I have used it only once so far, but the results were great. The stuffer delivers very quickly and smoothly. I still need my little KitchenKraft mincer to grind the meat, but I shall be seeing my sister soon who has promised to return my electric mincer.

Merguez

2kg fatty lamb chops
30g salt
6g black pepper
3g ground fennel
20g crushed garlic
24g harissa paste
sheep casings

Merguez is a North African sausage that I enjoy at our local Algerian restaurant, Al Casbah. Merguez are very popular in France and my mother tells me that when travelling there with my father, he would eat them wherever he found they were being served.

The recipes for Merguez that I have found on the net are split between the simple North African version and the more complex French chef's version. I stuck with a simple recipe that uses harissa to give colour and most of the spice.

As usual for fresh sausage, the ingredients are simply mixed together and stuffed into sheep casings. This is my first sausage that uses sheep casings rather than hog casings. This caused no problems and gives a lovely long, thin sausage shape. The recipe uses just lamb for the meat and I chose to use chops as the fat content seem about right. And I love lamb chops. There are many cheaper cuts of lamb to use than lamb chops that would work as well if not better.

Normally, I cook my sausages in the oven, but I prefer to grill Merguez. The sausages came out well, and I hope to go back to Al Casbah soon to see how they compare.

A Sicilian's sausage

Frank is my next door neighbour, an 83 year old Sicilian. He is amazingly fit for his age. Last summer I was surprised at how easily he took to climbing one of his large fig trees to pick me some fruit. He is always keeping busy growing vegetables in the garden or preserving them in his shed.

We got chatting about mincers, grinders and sausage making. He said that he used to make sausage and that the only thing holding him back now was not having a source of casings. I went back to Tong Master on-line and ordered some casings for him. The following week his grandson turned up on my door step with an offering of Sicilian fennel sausage, made with roughly chopped fennel seed. Of course, it was very good. I am planning to grow fennel this year and I will have a go at making a fresh fennel version.