The Travels of the Sausage

The Roman lucanica is the thread that links most of the sausages in this section. Its name, attested from the first century BC in Varro and Cicero, then in De re coquinaria (a compilation assembled between the fourth and fifth centuries under the name of Apicius), was deformed as it spread along the Roman roads, giving the luganega in Lombardy, the linguiça in Portugal, the longaniza in Spain. Each then followed its own trajectory, but the common point of departure remains legible in the vocabulary: the luganega monzese, sold by the metre in Lombard butchers’ shops, has little to do with the ancient recipe, and its name alone preserves the trace.

The arrival of the American chilli, brought back to Seville by Christopher Columbus in 1493, transformed the peninsula’s charcuterie within two centuries. Dried and ground, it becomes pimentón; slowly smoked over holm oak in the smokehouses of Extremadura, it gives pimentón de la Vera. On this spice depend today the colour, the taste and the preservation of the greater part of Iberian sausages: without it, the chorizo, the sobrassada and the chouriço would not have the form we know.

Cardamom has been present in Swedish fläskkorv, certain Danish sausages, and Scandinavian Christmas breads since the Middle Ages. A widespread tradition attributes its arrival to the Viking expeditions towards Constantinople, between the ninth and eleventh centuries, along the Russian rivers; a rival hypothesis, advanced by Scandinavian culinary archaeology, favours a route through Moorish Iberia and the Hanseatic networks. The first Scandinavian mention appears in the Libellus de arte coquinaria, a compilation whose oldest surviving manuscript, in Copenhagen, dates from the end of the thirteenth century. The charcuteries of the North, often associated with necessity and isolation, were in fact shaped from early on by long-distance exchange.

The sausages of this zone share not a single heritage but an accumulation of dominations superimposed, century after century, on the same territories and the same populations. Hungary was governed by the Ottomans for 150 years, then by the Habsburgs for more than 2 centuries, before being absorbed into the Soviet bloc for 4 decades. Croatia, Slovenia, Poland, Czechia, Romania and Serbia went through comparable sequences, in different orders and for different lengths. The present recipes bear the imprint of these successive ‘imperial strata’, whose contributions they often combine. The Hungarian kolbász joins charcuterie techniques inherited from the Austro-Hungarian tradition with paprika, introduced along the Ottoman routes. The Slovenian kranjska klobasa, whose PGI specification requires local pork, beech-wood smoking and cooling in cold water, is a product codified in the Austro-Hungarian mould.

Cumin scents the Maghrebi merguez, the Lebanese makanek and the Turkish sucuk. That is no accident: the northern, southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean shared the same sea routes for millennia, and the spices travelled with the merchants. The Middle East and the Persian Gulf extend this circulation towards Asia. It was by way of the Levant, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf that the Indian spices, turmeric, cinnamon, and cardamom, reached the Mediterranean kitchens, and by the same routes that Western culinary techniques gradually made their way east.

For this zone, a clarification is called for. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan are the heirs of the nomadic civilisations of the steppes. Azerbaijan is Turkic-speaking but Caucasian in its geography. Armenia and Georgia are Christian, speak distinct languages, and have histories that were, in part, shaped in opposition to the Turkic empires that surrounded them. Turkey does not appear in this zone: this book attaches it to the Mediterranean for reasons of charcuterie coherence, as the section ‘The division into eleven zones’ explains. The Turkic world of the title refers to the wider Eurasian space in which Turkic-speaking peoples developed common culinary traditions before the formation of modern nation-states.

This section contains only seven recipes for a continent of more than a billion inhabitants and hundreds of culinary traditions. Sub-Saharan Africa possesses considerable traditions of meat transformation, but in the end, very few cased specialities. These are rarely standardised in recipes and are often poorly documented in accessible sources. This imbalance reflects the state of the available documentation, not the real richness of African culinary traditions.

The choice to treat the Americas in a single chapter, from Canada to Patagonia, rests on a shared logic: American charcuterie traditions are, for the most part, European inheritances transformed by local ingredients, the spices of the New World, and the immigrant or deported communities that received and adapted them. This continuity justifies presenting them together rather than country by country. It is not a matter of effacing the pre-Hispanic traditions that predate colonisation, but of underlining that the American continent is, in this book, the best-documented ground on which charcuterie was reshaped by colonisation and migration.

The sausages of this zone are not European imports. Chinese dried sausages are attested from the first centuries of our era, with a detailed description in the Qimin Yaoshu (around AD 544), a Chinese agricultural encyclopaedia contemporary with the compilation of the De re coquinaria in the late Roman world. The lactic fermentation of raw meat, practised in Thailand and Vietnam for generations, rests on a technical mastery whose principles are comparable to those of the independently developed Mediterranean cheese fermentations. The chapter ‘The origins’ illustrates this antiquity.

In its dominant representations, India is a mostly vegetarian civilisation. Dietary prohibitions there are many: the sacred cow among the Hindus, the impure pig among the Muslims, meat absent from Jain and Buddhist practice. To these religious prescriptions is added, among a large part of non-vegetarian Hindus, a customary avoidance that no sacred text prescribes, but which goes back to an old association of the pig with impurity. The formal religious prohibition and the social convention thus overlap to restrict the consumption of pork well beyond the Muslim population alone. These constraints largely explain why cased charcuterie holds a marginal place in the Indian food landscape: meat, when it is prepared, is prepared rather as kebab, as kheema (a minced-meat dish), as curry or as a ball, formats that require no casing.

Oceania is the last great region of the world to have been peopled. The colonisation of this space took place from west to east, over several millennia, by successive waves of Austronesian navigators setting out from South-East Asia. New Zealand was not peopled by the Māori until around the thirteenth century, while some islands of the central Pacific received their first inhabitants only after the year 1000. This youth of the settlement is directly legible in this section: the culinary traditions of the zone are among the most recent in the world, and its charcuterie traditions are even more recent. European colonisation, from Cook’s voyage in 1769, came to overlay indigenous food traditions founded on fishing, hunting and a few subsistence crops.