interesting facts
how do you eat yours? - top 5 serving suggestions
sausage psychology
sausage nation
records and quantities
sausage through the centuries
links
- With over £600 million spent on sausages and 266,500 tonnes consumed in the last year, a recent study delved deep into Britain’s sausage consumption habits to discover some pretty delicious data…
- Sausages storm ahead as the number 1 ‘in-home meal’ in the UK … ahead of the cheese and ham sandwich
- The big questions is: Why buy sausages? The most popular answer given: Because I’ve run out at home!! So clearly the British don’t like to be without sausage in the house
- Every British Household spends an average of £22.24 on 8 kg of sausages a year. Over 90% of households buy them regularly.
HOW DO YOU EAT YOURS? The top 5 serving suggestions
- Savour it in a sausage sandwich
- Squirt on the tomato sauce
- Drown it in gallons of gravy
- Love it with Baked Beans
- Vibrant with Veg
- Sausages … we all want them and consumption keeps growing across all age groups … with the exception of the over 65’s but the fastest growth is amongst young men (aged 17 – 24) – 14.1%
- Searching for Sausages on the internet reveals over 300,000 web pages about sausages
- The convenience of sausages entice 6.8% of people but 13.4% succumb simply because they fancy a change. 8.4% consider them a treat. But the largest number, nearly 30% eat them simply because sausages are their favourite meal.
- Sausages are loved all day long. Not purely a classic breakfast ingredient, on 44% of occasions the sausage is the star of an evening meal, rising to such status by a steady 20% over recent years.
- There is an increase in trendy restaurants, pubs and café’s devoted to the Sausage include:
- The Sozzled Sausage Bar in Leamington Spa
- The Sussex Brewery In Emsworth Sussex which boasts over 45 varieties of sausage on its menu
- S&M a chain of sausage and mash restaurants in London
- The Clifton Sausage in Bristol which serves over 1,500 sausage meals per week
- The Sozzled Sausage Bar in Leamington Spa
- Delving into the mind of a sausage lover reveals that the combination of a hard exterior and soft interior and the moreish quality and succulent aftertaste makes the sausage irresistible.
- While the convenient ease of cooking and the range of flavours from the traditional to the ethnic mean that Britons just can’t get enough.
- Today, British sausages even have their own fan club, the British Sausage Appreciation Society, which has over 6,000 members.
- British Sausage week will be happening for the 8th year between 24th October to 30th October 2005 as fans up and down the country celebrate sausages.
- Sausages really are the nations’ favourite food, with celebrity fans including Prince Charles, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine, Roger Moore, Keith Floyd, Elvis, who loved sausage rolls, Des O’Connor, Kian from Westlife and Rachel Stevens whose favourite comfort food is a sausage sandwich.
- There are more than 470 recipes and flavours for sausages in Britain. If you take into account all the different variations from butchers across the country you could eat a different British sausage every day for ten years.
- Northerners tend to prefer sausages with more coarsely ground sausage meat, whereas Southerners prefer it smoother.
- Butchers across the UK regularly compete in sausage competitions. These include the Great Yorkshire Pie, Sausage and Black Pudding competition, held every year in November, The Birmingham and District Butcher’s Association National Product Competition at the County Showground, Stafford (November), The British Pig Association’s Smithfield Sausage Competition (December)and the BPEX Product Evaluation Event (September-March).
- The highest accolade for any butcher is the Meat Trades Journal Champion of Champions Award.
- In Great Britain, over £500 million was spent on sausages in 2004 over 10% of that figure was spent in butchers.
- The World’s longest sausage was made in October 2000 during British Sausage Week and weighed 15.5 tonnes and was 35 miles long!
- The most expensive sausage in the UK was made from fillet steak with Champagne and truffles and cost £20 each!
- Sausage machines can fill sausages at a rate of 1 ½ miles an hour.
- The history of the sausage starts at least 5,000 years ago in Sumeria (modern day Iraq).
- By 900 BC sausages had become the popcorn of the ancient Greek theatre, available from sausage sellers in the aisles.
- In 320 AD the Roman Emperor Constantinus I and the Catholic Church banned sausage eating because of links to pagan festivals! This led to sausages going underground until the ban was lifted.
- The sausage was in trouble again nine hundred years ago. Emperor Leo V declared that sausage makers would be ‘severely scourged, smoothly shaved and banished from our realm forever’. It is not known what sausage sellers had done to cause such offence.
- It was in the reign of Charles I that sausages were divided into links for the first time.
- Apparently legendary highwayman, Dick Turpin, was known to moonlight as a butcher making sausages from the finest meats hunted in Epping Forest.
- Sausages were nicknamed bangers during the Second World War because when they were fried they tended to explode with a bang!
- Otto von Bismarck once remarked: ‘laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made’.
- Henry V stated: ‘War without fire is as worthless as sausages without mustard’.
