Sausage, Weiners, Frankfurters & Bangers

[image error]Sausages are the worlds first prepared food. They are made from ground meat, fat, salt and spices that are packed into a casing.

It was done originally not to create a delicious dish. It was done to keep meat from spoiling in the age before refrigeration. The word sausage comes from the Latin word salsus, which means salted or preserved.

It was also a way for butchers for use edible portions of animals, such as scraps and organ meat. The meat is ground and packed in a casing that was traditionally made from animal intestines. Today, it is made generally of collagen, cellulose or even plastic.

Once the casing is packed, it is preserved by curing, drying or smoking.

The Oldest Sausages

Sumeria is cited as the first place where sausages appeared around 3000 B.C.

Chinese sausage appeared around 589 B.C. and was made from lamb or goat meat.

As different countries discovered sausages, they also discovered different ways to prepare it with different spices to create their own flavors.

The Sausage in Literature

Sausages began to appear in literature centuries before the birth of Christ. Epicharmus wrote a comedy called The Sausage around 500 B.C.Blood sausage is mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey, written about 700 B.C. The passage reads:

“These goat sausages sizzling here in the fire –

we packed them with fat and blood to have for supper.

Now, whoever wins this bout and proves the stronger,

Let that man step up and take his pick of the lot!”

Banning Sausage

In ancient Roman, sausage became used in fertility rites and wound up being banned by the early Catholic church.

“By 228 A.D., sausages were popular at the Roman festival Lupercalia, where, some historians believe, they were used as more than a food during the fertility rites. The early Christian Church was scandalized and made eating sausage a sin. But sausage-eating persisted, and eventually the Church was forced to repeal the ban,” Janet Aird wrote in History Magazine.

Early in the 10th century in the Byzantine Empire, Emperor Leo the Wise outlawed the production of blood sausages following cases of food poisoning.

Variations on Sausages

Different peoples developed sausages differently depending on the spices and meats available.

In Bologna, Italy, the residents developed bologna. The frankfurter is believed to have originated in Frankfurt, Germany and the weiner in Vienna, Austria.

Aird said of Frankfurt, “This was probably where the bun was added, making sausages one of the first convenience food.”

Hot Dogs

Frankfurters made their way to America in the mid-19th Century. Charles Feltman, a German butcher, open his Coney Island hot dog stand in 1871 and sold 3,684 “dachshund” sausages in a milk roll during his first year in business.

Hot dogs gained popularity as an inexpensive, easy-to-eat food during the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. That same year they also became the food of choice in baseball parks.

“Today’s sausage on a bun was probably introduced during the St. Louis “Louisiana Purchase Exposition” in 1904 by Bavarian concessionaire, Anton Feuchtwanger. He loaned white gloves to his patrons to hold his piping hot sausages. Most of the gloves were not returned, and the supply began running low. He reportedly asked his brother-in-law, a baker, for help. The baker improvised long soft rolls that fit the meat–thus inventing the hot dog bun,” according to Roper Sausages web site.

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