Sausage as symbol

On the paradoxical nature of sausages and a syrupy Indian snack.

Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter, presented in partnership with Eat It! - K Road's restaurant month.

Image via Flickr

I bloody love a sausage. I love their ease on a week night, the way they give so much flavour while being so easy to cook and hard to muck up. I love a sausage sizzle, a charred snag snug in a blanket of the cheapest white bread, smothered in sugary tomato sauce, a wiggle of mustard, topped with a tong-full of scraggly grilled onions. I love trying creative flavours from a good butchery – blueberry venison, lamb and mussel, duck á l’Orange. I love the way you can squeeze the meat from the casing to make a really good pasta sauce. I love getting a smoky mouthful of lap cheung as it melts in my claypot rice. I love those little pink pork sausages I always put in my mala xiang guo selection at Hot & Spicy Pot. I love the unnaturally red casing of a cocktail sausage dipped in the bloodier shade of Watties tomato sauce, the way they bounce when a toddler throws them to the floor. I love sausages cooked in batter, from sausage rolls to my dad’s toad in the hole, and the crusty wreaths of bread studded with fatty moons of cabanossi they make at my local bakery.

Why are sausages so damn good? Broadly defined, sausages are any kind of encased and seasoned ground meat product – seasoned being the operative word as this is really the top cause for deliciousness, salt added liberally along with spices and aromatics. But there is also the endless potential of ground meat. For many, this is what renders sausages less than appealing, given how grinding is often a way of amalgamating various parts of the animal – muscle, fat, tissue, blood, skin and offal – but this combining of parts is also a way of creating rich, complex flavours. As famed Italian butcher Dario Cecchini (subject of a particularly good episode of Chef’s Table) will tell you,"hardworking muscle has collagen to hold the sausage together, fat adds flavour" – but every part of the animal holds unique possibilities.

When skilled butchers like Cecchini break down a whole pig, every part is assigned a purpose. In Italy, for instance, the head and feet might be used for soppressata, the skin for cotechino, and the liver for spicy nduja. In Vietnam, liver and other organ meats find their way into lạp xưởng, while ears and offal feature in chả lụa. While some fragile modern folk may balk at the notion of these parts hiding in their dinner, it is kind of the point of sausages, which emerged some 4000 years ago, borne from the need to make use of every last scrap of hard-won protein, and the subsequent ingenious development of salting and smoking as ways to make meat last longer.

This history goes some way towards explaining why sausages are useful and popular, but it also reveals the paradoxical nature of the sausage. Here is a food devised to keep bellies full over lean winters, cleverly designed to turn those parts of an animal that might be considered less noble into a form that is not only palatable but desired across all social classes. Over the centuries, though, sausages have been not only demonised, but often rightly so – their smooth forms misused as a way of disguising spoiled or diseased meat among myriad other horrors. Even today, many regard sausages with great suspicion, unsure what might be hidden within the casing. It’s a valid question, as under the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, products marketed as sausage must contain “at least 50% fat-free meat flesh”, leaving the other 50% open for whatever. Bread, fat, spices and vegetables are all fine additions, but often you will find less desirable extras such as wheat rusk, corn syrup and laundry lists of chemicals – indeed, The Guardian has even described sausages as “a cylindrical tube of intestine stuffed with naught but pure evil.”

Are sausages alluring in spite of their paradoxical nature, or because of it? This is not a question I can answer for you, every sausage lover will have to find their own truth. All I know is that for me, sausages might just be the perfect symbol for the kind of high-low approach to food that I am all about, spanning from the fresh house-made pork spirals at Apero to a $2.50 snag outside Bunnings on a frosty Saturday morning.

EAT IT: Karangahape Road's month long pleasure party

Head to K Road this month for Eat It: twenty events that cater to every foodie fantasy. Think kinky cocktails and playful dishes that celebrate this iconic strip's colourful history. For opening night tonight, check out the metre long sausage at Apero and the 'Show us your Melons' cocktail at Caluzzi. Over the rest of the week find wagyu wedges at Candela and other naughty snacks among other naughty nights. Send your receipts here to go in the draw to win $200 in K Road vouchers – attend two or more events and you'll be in to win $1000 in  vouchers!

Check out the full Eat It schedule, here.

Weekly bites

At a time when millions are choosing to boycott global corporations (whether they are on the official BDS list or not), the antique town of Tīrau – best known for its beloved line-up of corrugated iron animal heads – is staring down the barrel of not one but two such entities opening up shop if consent is given for the building of a Starbucks and Burger King on their main road. Keen to preserve the village atmosphere of their small town, locals are speaking out in the media – and hopefully also making submissions to the South Waikato District Council.

Another neighbourhood whose central character may be under threat is Sandringham, a central Tāmaki suburb renowned for its South Asian flavour. In the latest Kai Cover Story, Shanti Mathias explains how Sandringham developed its unique character, describes the restaurants and markets that have built on the momentum of one another’s success, and considers what is next for the suburb as the city swells and the area becomes more and more desirable, changing the flavour in ways not entirely predictable.  

In heartwarming news, national treasure Sam Low hosted famous comedian Ali Wong for dinner in his home last week, serving a herbal, healing feast that included a slow-cooked whole duck wrapped in lotus leaf, chicken and scallop broth with baby bok choy and Wong’s favourite: pomelo and raw tuna salad with herbs. Low explains how this generous dinner came to be in this RNZ article.

Win a $30,000 hospitality scholarship

The Visa New Zealand Hospitality Scholarship is back, offering the chance of a lifetime to a young hospo professional.

The recipient has the opportunity to propel their career with international experience, mentorship and business training.

The Scholarship is open to front or back of house hospitality workers, who are NZ residents, aged 22-35. Applications close on Monday 22 July. For more information, click here.

Snack of the week

Kala Chumchum $21 per 500g from Auckland Indian Sweets & Snacks

After shopping at Lotus Supermarket, I always stop at the Indian Sweets & Snacks counter on the way out, maybe grabbing a warmly spiced khachouri or a bag of puffy vada flecked with curry leaves. But every time I visit, my eyes always check the fridge first, searching for the brown, syrup-soaked, cream-stuffed forms of my absolute favourite Indian sweet: Chumchum.

I remember trying Chumchum, along with many other Indian sweets – gentle crumbly milk Barfi, spongy aromatic Gulab Jamun, glossy crispy orange Jalebi – backstage at an Indian dance concert when I was perhaps 6 years old, having fallen into dancing thanks to our neighbour, who taught Indian dance to a group of young girls in her living room once a week – my sister and I brought into the fold because we were friends with her daughter, and she with our mother. I was not much of a dancer, but I did love sweets, and so I sampled every milky, syrupy, rose and cardamom scented delicacy available, each one better than the last, until Chumchum.

The internet tells me it is a popular Bengali dessert, made from chhena (Indian cottage cheese) soaked in a sugary syrup and flavoured with cardamom. Sometimes it is garnished with flakes of coconut or dried fruit – Sweets & Snacks’ version is usually studded with half a glacé cherry – or split open like a donut and filled with sweetened cream, adding even more richness to a sweet that is already so rich and unctuous, the texture close to a cake soaked in syrup but somehow more toothsome, the chhena able to hold onto the syrup without ever collapsing. Chumchum is extremely sweet, certainly not for the faint-hearted or even sweet-indifferent. But for the bonafide sweet tooths out there, it’s a 10/10.

Mā te wā, 

Lucinda