Basic Information
Sausage is a traditional - and extremely widespread - foodstuff made from processed meat packed into a skin made from animal intestine to give a distinctive, cylindrical shape. Some producers will also add herbs and/or spices and sometimes other vegetable products (for example bread crumbs1 used as a bulking agent). Salt is also a common additive for its preservative qualities. Size varies from tiny chipolatas and cocktail sausages to huge, pudding like things such as the Scottish Haggis (actually made using a sheep's stomach as the casing). Meat used will be whatever is at hand - typically a single animal, but where several different species of animal are killed at once, mixed meat sausages are entirely possible. Some more refined sausages may be made specifically of a single type of meat (such as the leberwurst, composed mostly of liver).
Typically sausage making is used to get edible food out of parts of the animal that are difficult to consume any other way - meat offcuts, unwanted organs, fat and similar things … such things are ground up small, mixed with any additives and then packed into the casing. The case is then tied off into convenient lengths, after which the individual links may be separated or kept as a chain. Thereafter they may be cooked and eaten directly or preserved by drying, smoking or other techniques.
Being made from low grade meat (and, as noted above, sometimes packed out with non-meat products) sausages are typically cheap (as meat goes) and common amongst poorer people. Also, due to their convenient shape, they can be easily cooked and sold as street food. Preserved sausage is also likely to be relatively widespread.
Related materials include the black and white puddings, both being sausage like objects made from flour or meal and seasoning, blended with blood (for a black pudding) or fat (for a white pudding) - again, making marginal fractions of the animal into useful food.
Sources
Game and Story Use
- Expect a lot of this about in most realistic settings.
- Badly preserved sausage can rot on the inside and become an absolute death trap.
- Sausage hanging from the rafters should be a common furnishing in a lot of places.
- Harnworld's orcs (known as gargun) have their own, even less wholesome, sausage making tradition.
- "Sausage meat" - that is, the sort of ground mixed meat with fillers used to fill sausages - can also be used separately to make meatballs, pies and other pastries.