Sausage Making with Daniel Serra
Daniel Serra is one of the authors of An Early Meal – a Viking Age Cookbook & Culinary Odyssey. He was running a sausage-making workshop at the Boyne Valley Viking Experience, so I found it absolutely necessary to go.
These Viking things are interesting, but they never quite grab me. Too much focus on fighting (which then looks unsafe from the SCA point of view), and less on day-to-day life, although I have to say there were some very nice cooking setups at this one. There were many stalls - about 60% jewellery - from which I bought a few odds and ends of things; some nice S-hooks for my camp kitchen, a ladle and some other bits. I thought about wearing garb, but didn't, and didn't really miss it.
Anyway. The sausage making included everything except preparing the intestine. We started with chopping the meat - 2 parts beef, 2 parts pork, and 1 part cold-smoked bacon. This was reduced to pea-sized bits, and since there were about ten people working on it, and only a couple of kilos of meat, it was quickly enough done.
The meat was then mixed together, and pounded. This is a process that has largely been lost from modern cookery, I think - we've replaced it with mincing (grinding, in American English), which doesn't do quite the same thing. Many of the Arabic recipes I've worked with have included instructions to pound the meat, and it really does make a difference both in texture and taste; pounded meat takes on the flavour of vegetables, herbs and spices better.
We then added flavourings - mustard, prepared the previous day, in one batch, and wild garlic, juniper and thyme in the other. Also a little water, which adds overall coherency, and helps steam the sausages from inside a little in cooking. These were mixed in by hand. Notably, we didn't add any salt.
The final step was to stuff the actual sausages. Daniel had gotten hold of far more intestine than was needed, so we cut bits off at about 60cm lengths. He had a bunch of little horn tools - essentially funnels - which were segments of cow horn, narrower at one end. These apparently turn up in Swedish flea markets all the time. You put the intestine over the narrow end, hold it in place, and stuff the meat in through the wider end. Some were wider at the narrow end than others, and I think the optimal width there is probably about 12-15mm; the intestine otherwise tends to slide off.
The most effective way to make sure the intestine is not tangled is to blow into the wide end of the horn once it's on; this puffs out the intestine like a balloon, and provides a very amusing short squeaky noise as air comes out the other end.
We then stuffed meat through the horn segments and into the sausages. This was remarkably easy, in the end; the intestine is strong stuff, and deals pretty well with being manipulated. There were more issues with it sliding off the horn device than anything else. The end result was a neat pile of sausages.
Daniel reckoned these were either boiled (with a reference to "kettle-worms" in one saga) or grilled, rather than fried. These examples were boiled, and came out very well.
Someone noted that sausages were a particularly useful way of providing meat to people who didn't have many teeth (yet, for children, or still, for older people). Daniel also said that these sausages could be smoked to preserve them.
There were a few other interesting bits of conversation about other cookery topics, of course, but I'll note and credit those when they arise in other posts. It was an excellent day.
