The ways of the sausage
Well, I’ve got sausages on my mind at the moment owing to all my sausagey exploits. And I’ve been thinking how the good old British banger could be successfully mated to Italian cuisine. Italians have quite varied tastes in food, but on the whole tend to prefer subtly flavoured dishes, so I’m not sure how they might react to the taste explosion that an English sausage may cause. However, Italians are not adverse to strong flavours, indeed there is good old Gorgonzola and then there are the Barolo laced wild boar and venison game dishes that go down well. Down south chilli is very common and the southerners quite like something that is a bit on the spicy side. However, overly spicy food is not popular in Milan though, if you go for and Indian meal here, the spiciness will not blow your socks off. At least not in my experience, and this is despite having told Indian chefs to spice things up to the maximum.
Anyway, assuming that English sausages manage to get the Italian thumbs up and they are not overcome by the spices, what can they eat them with? Perhaps it would be better to ask how the mythical British banger can be cooked. They can, of course, be fried and thus raise cholesterol levels to frightening levels, but this would not be appreciated by Italians, who would consider the results as being too ‘heavy’, not to mention being worried about the cholesterol. Possibly the best way to cook them would be either under the grill or on the griddle. Cooking things on the griddle is common here, and is really a sort of indoor version of the ‘grigliata’ or barbecue.
The other way in which sausages are prepared is to oven cook them with chunks of potato. My other half does this and it makes for a nice hearty dish. Aside from potatoes, Italians tend to eat sausages with polenta and this I think would make just about the perfect accompaniment to English bangers, although the subject sausages are generally broken into little pieces and cooked in a tomato sauce. I suppose the same could be done with English bangers, but it would be better to put the polenta on a plate and then place the sausages next to it, maybe adding a few cooked tomatoes. This would make for an an interesting winter dish which would also go down rather well with visiting Brits and one or two other nationalities. I shall be trying this combination out myself, and I’m looking forward to it.
In the UK, sausages and mashed potato are quite common, and the same thing could be eaten here, only the mash would be replaced by the almost sauce like purè. Still, it would make for a good dish and English people would be quite happy if the plate was filled with a few spoonfuls of good old baked beans too - which, incidentally, I know where to get. Well, this place had Heinz baked beans the last time I was there.
And finally, other things like sausages and chips, sausage sandwiches, and even sausage pizza toppings would probably go down quite well. And finally, cold sausages could be impaled onto cocktail sticks and served up at dinner parties and the like in order to create that sophisticated Anglo-Saxon touch.
I’m sure others could come up with more combinations and even a few recipes that would benefit from sausages and at the same time create a fusion between English and Italian food. Time will tell, and I plan on holding a sausage tasting as soon as the first British bangers come off the Italian production line.
Interesting times ahead. I shall go banging on about this succulent subject for some time to come, I’m afraid.
More on the super sausage search
My sausage seeking endeavours starting to bear fruit. After having estabilshed that importing bangers from Spain would cost a arm and a leg (c. £3000=00!! eek!), as I had suspected, I headed off down an alternative route.
Today, I popped into a local butchers here in Milan which is a whole five minutes on foot from my house and had a chat with the friendly owner Silvia about the possibility of making the sausages here in Italy. She was quite interested in the idea, although she wanted me to supervise the sausage production process. I’ll do it, but I don’t really know that much about making the things. I am good at eating them though. Anyway, next stop: find a sausage recipe.
The sausage recipe and ingredients have been located. Now I shall have another word with the butchers and see what they say. With a little luck Cumberland sausages may soon be available in Italy…..
Desperately seeking sausages!
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find 100 good quality vacuum-packed Cumberland sausages and export them asap to the 4-4-2 pub here in Milan, Italy. This blog post will self-destruct within 15 seconds.
Yep, finding English sausages has poor Alessandro down at the 4-4-2 pub banging his head against a brick wall. The search for these elusive sausages really is proving a ‘mission impossible’. So, if any of my English readers out there know where to get vacuum packed Cumberland bangers and can DHL, TNT, UPS or FedEx them over to Milan in Italy, Alessandro, and I, will be eternally grateful and all expenses will be paid. If the sausages prove to be a success, then this could well turn into a fixed weekly order for 100 or so of these things. Sorry to bang on about this, but one would not imagine that in the 21st century getting something as banal as British bangers over to Italy could be so darned difficult. This is an SOS - Save Our Sausages!
Sausage Crisis!
My good friends at the 4-4-2 pub in Milan, as I have mentioned before, are about to launch their full English breakfast. The launch is planned for the 28th and 29th of October, 2007. But the 4-4-2 has a problem, a big problem: that is they have no good frozen English sausages to serve up with their inaugural English breakfast. Alessandro the landlord urgently needs a supply of good frozen English sausages.
If you think you can help him out, and you happen to be an English sausage manufacturer who would like to enter the Italian market, this could be a great business opportunity. Personally, I think that English style sausages would go down rather well here, with the right marketing, of course. The England brand is strong, and, as an aside, I believe that good quality subtly flavoured English sausages, either fresh or frozen, would sell well here in Italy. This would be a good opportunity to test the market and verify whether Italy is a good market for your products. I believe that Sainsbury’s, the UK supermarket chain, has a link with the Italian supermarket chain Esselunga, so perhaps either could help out.
You can contact Alessandro, the landlord of the 4-4-2 pub in Milan from the 4-4-2 site, which is here. The 4-4-2’s telephone number is +39 0233101296, and Alessandro speaks English.
Please help resolve the sausage crisis!
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