Further reading

Literary works

Homer, Odyssey (eighth century BC) — Two complementary passages make this poem one of the oldest known literary descriptions of a blood sausage. In Book XVIII, during the fight that sets him against the beggar Iros, Odysseus sees the suitors put up, as the victor’s prize, goats’ stomachs filled with fat and blood, roasted over the embers. In Book XX, the sleepless Odysseus is compared to a man who turns and turns over the fire a stomach full of blood and fat, so impatient is he to reach his ends.

Epicharmus, Orya (first half of the fifth century BC) — A lost comedy of which only the title, Orya, is attested by ancient sources. The Greek word ὀρύα designates a pork-based preparation akin to the sausage. Epicharmus, who lived in Syracuse under Gelon then under Hieron I, is regarded as one of the founders of Greek comedy. The title alone suffices to establish that this product was familiar enough to the Greek world of Sicily to serve as the subject of a play.

Aristophanes, The Knights (424 BC) — Political satire in which a sausage-seller, Agoracritus, prevails over Cleon in a contest of demagoguery and ends by restoring Demos, the personified Athenian people. Aristophanes uses the sausage-seller’s trade as a figure of popular vulgarity, which presupposes a product known to all Athenians.

Cicero, Letters to his Friends (46–44 BC) — In letter 9.16, paragraph 8, addressed to his Epicurean friend Lucius Papirius Paetus, resident in Naples, Cicero evokes the lucanica among the dishes — olives and lucanicae — that he once relished at his friend’s table. It is one of the oldest known mentions of this sausage in Latin, contemporary with Varro’s notice.

Martial, Epigrams (around AD 84–85) — Book XIII of the Epigrams, entitled Xenia, gathers couplets conceived as labels for gifts offered to guests during the Saturnalia. Epigram 35, entitled Lucanica, makes the sausage itself speak: ‘A Lucanian sausage, daughter of a Picenum sow, I am a delicious setting for white porridge.’ The couplet attests the reputation of the lucanica at Rome under Domitian, where it appeared among the presents a host might offer his guests.

Petronius, Satyricon (first century AD) — Mentions the botulus (blood sausage) among the sausages that spill from the roast pig at Trimalchio’s (chapter 49). The term survived in the word ‘botulism’, coined in 1870 by the German physician Müller from the Latin botulus to rename ‘Kerner’s disease’, then associated with the eating of spoiled blood sausages and sausages in Württemberg.

Anonymous, La Bataille de Caresme et de Charnage (second half of the thirteenth century) — An anonymous fabliau in octosyllables, probably composed in Picardy or Champagne, one of the oldest texts of French gastronomic literature. In the form of a parody of a chanson de geste, it sets two armies of foods against each other: the camp of Charnage, ranged behind meat and pork, and that of Caresme, led by fish and herring. It is one of the first literary stagings of the opposition between the fat and the lean, between Carnival and Lent, that would recur two centuries later in Rabelais and, in painting, in Bruegel.

François Rabelais, Pantagruel (Lyon, 1532), Gargantua (1534) and The Fourth Book (1552) — The Pantagruelian cycle offers one of the richest charcuterie mentions of French literature. Rabelais published Pantagruel in Lyon in 1532, under the pseudonym Alcofrybas Nasier, when he had just been appointed physician at the Hôtel-Dieu. Gargantua (1534) stages, from the opening, the feast of tripe of Gargamelle that triggers the childbirth, and recalls that Grandgousier had permanently ‘andouilles in abundance, when it was the season’: this catalogue of regional specialities testifies to a French charcuterie repertoire already identified by geographical origin at the start of the sixteenth century. The Fourth Book (1552) contains, in chapters XXXV and following, the famous war of the Andouilles, in which Cervelas, Godiveaux, Boudins and Saucissons intervene; the Saulcissons montigènes and the Boudins saulvaiges are presented as allies of the Andouilles in the allegorical conflict that opposes them to Quaresmeprenant, read by critics as a coded evocation of the Swiss and German Protestant peoples in the context of the Wars of Religion.

Johann Fischart, Affenteurliche und Ungeheurliche Geschichtschrift (Strasbourg, Bernhard Jobin, 1575) — First transposition into a foreign language of Rabelais’s Gargantua, by a Strasbourg satirist. Fischart adapts the Rabelaisian lists of dishes by replacing the local specialities with knackwurst, which constitutes, according to the philologists and the Knack d’Alsace PGI file (submitted then withdrawn in 2015), the oldest known written attestation of this sausage.

Jan Chryzostom Pasek, Pamiętniki (around 1690, posthumous publication: Edward Raczyński, 1836) — Memoirs of Jan Chryzostom Pasek (around 1636–1701), a Polish szlachcic and soldier under Stefan Czarniecki, covering the years 1656–1688. During the Denmark campaign of 1658, Pasek describes in detail the Danish making of a blood sausage of blood, barley or buckwheat groats and animal casings, cooked in a cauldron and served in a crown around the head of the slaughtered beast — a direct testimony to the tradition of the blodpølse, a close cousin of the Polish kaszanka.

Robert Burns, Address to a Haggis (1786) — A poem in Scots composed by Robert Burns on his arrival in Edinburgh, late November 1786, by tradition, during a dinner at the merchant Andrew Bruce’s. First published in the Caledonian Mercury on 19 December 1786, under the title Address to a Haggice, then taken up in the Scots Magazine in January 1787 and included in the Edinburgh edition of the Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in 1787. Burns opposes the haggis — an honest peasant dish — to the fashionable French ragouts of the aristocracy, and salutes it as ‘Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race’. This text contributed to the lasting association of the haggis with Scottish national identity. The first Burns Supper was held in July 1801 by the Reverend Hamilton Paul at the Burns Cottage of Alloway, in Ayrshire; Burns Night is celebrated every 25 January, the poet’s birthday, in Scottish communities the world over.

George Orwell, The Art of Donald McGill (Horizon magazine, 1941) — Essay by the British writer George Orwell (1903–1950) devoted to the comic postcards of the English seaside resorts and to their principal illustrator, Donald McGill. Orwell analyses this bawdy comedy, in which the sausage appears among the objects of the allusion, as a tolerated saturnalia, a safety valve of convention rather than a subversion. It is one of the rare serious studies of a popular genre that censorship still pursued: McGill was fined in 1954 under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857.

Cinema and television

Mario Monicelli, La mortadella (1971) — Italian comedy (international title Lady Liberty) directed by Mario Monicelli, with Sophia Loren in the role of Maddalena Ciarrapico, a young Italian woman who arrives at JFK airport in New York to join her fiancé and is refused entry because she carries a mortadella given by her colleagues at the factory where she worked. Refusing to part with it, she settles in the customs office and triggers a diplomatic incident. The film reflects the American prohibition on importing Italian pork products, established due to the risk of swine vesicular disease, which emerged in the 1960s and was resistant to both cooking and curing. The mortadella and the prosciutto di Parma benefited from a first partial lifting in 1987, while most other Italian salumi were authorised for import only from 2013.

L’Île aux enfants (ORTF/FR3, then TF1, 1974–1982) — French children’s television programme created by Christophe Izard and Yves Brunier, broadcast in 968 episodes from 16 September 1974, first on the third colour channel of the ORTF then on FR3 (January–February 1975) and finally on TF1 until 30 June 1982. The main character, the orange dinosaur Casimir, holds his favourite dish, the gloubi-boulga, a mixture of strawberry jam, grated chocolate, mashed banana, strong mustard and a saucisse de Toulouse ‘raw but lukewarm’. The recipe appears in the episode of 30 September 1974. This reference attests to the saucisse de Toulouse's anchoring in French popular culture.

Historical culinary collections

Mesopotamian culinary tablets, Yale Babylonian Collection (around 1750 BC) — Three Akkadian tablets of baked clay, held at the Yale Babylonian Collection under the shelfmarks YBC 4644, YBC 8958 and YBC 4648, gathering some forty recipes: spiced broths, stews, poultry pies. Casings and the stomach appear there as ingredients of certain broths (notably in the recipe of the ‘red broth’), which testifies to an already sophisticated use of offal, but none of the surviving recipes explicitly describes a sausage-stuffing process. They are nonetheless the oldest known culinary texts. Studied by Jean Bottéro from 1979 to 1980, first published in 1982. Reference critical edition: Mesopotamian Culinary Texts, Eisenbrauns, 1995.

Apicius, De re coquinaria (fourth-century AD compilation) — The oldest surviving Roman culinary collection. It contains a detailed recipe of lucanica of minced pork, pine nuts, peppercorns and liquamen (fermented fish sauce), lifted with a pounded blend of pepper, cumin, savoury, rue, parsley and bay berries. The mixture is stuffed into a very fine casing, then hung in the smoke. It is the oldest technical protocol of sausage-making to have reached us.

Jia Sixie, Qimin Yaoshu (齊民要術, around AD 544) — The oldest fully preserved Chinese agronomic treatise, in ten books (juan) and ninety-two chapters. Compiled by Jia Sixie, an official native of Shouguang in Shandong and governor of the Gaoyang commandery, the work covers agriculture, horticulture, forestry, sericulture, animal husbandry, brewing, cooking and food preservation. It contains the first written description of a stuffing technique in China — stuffing minced, seasoned meat into a casing and preserving it by drying — which serves as the documentary ancestor of the contemporary lap cheong. The title translates as ‘Essential techniques for the welfare of the people’.

Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq, Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh (second half of the tenth century) — The oldest surviving cookbook in Arabic, compiled in Baghdad. It gathers more than six hundred recipes from the Abbasid courts of the eighth and ninth centuries, several of which are for laqāniq, sausages stuffed into fine casings. The Arabic word laqāniq (with its variants naqāniq, maqāniq) is a borrowing from Byzantine Greek loukanikon, itself from the Latin lucanica; its presence in the work attests the spread of this sausage from the Mediterranean towards the East from the first millennium.

Llibre de Sent Soví (composed around 1324, manuscript of the early fifteenth century) — The oldest surviving cookbook in Catalan, an anonymous text. Two manuscripts are known: that of Valencia, shorter (72 recipes), today regarded as the closest to the original; that of Barcelona, longer (222 recipes), identified by recent researchers as a derived and augmented work, the Llibre de totes maneres de potatges de menjar. The work documents the cooking of the elite of the Crown of Aragon before the arrival of New World products. Like most medieval recipe books, it does not deal specifically with charcuterie products, but it contains the pioneering mention of a botifara de coll de gallina (a hen’s-neck sausage), the first known occurrence of the term botifara in Catalan literature. Reference edition: Joan Santanach, Editorial Barcino, 2006; French translation by Patrick Gifreu, Éditions de la Merci, 2013.

The Forme of Cury (around 1390) — Literally, in Middle English: ‘The Manner of Cooking’. A manuscript written by the master cooks of Richard II of England, the most important English culinary book of the Middle Ages. It contains about two hundred recipes and testifies to the refinement of late-fourteenth-century English aristocratic cooking, strongly marked by imported spices (ginger, saffron, galangal). It notably contains a preparation called Afronchemoyle, a mixture of eggs, breadcrumbs, chopped mutton fat, peppered and saffroned, sewn into a sheep’s stomach, then cooked; further from the present haggis than the slightly later recipes, but identifiable as a direct ancestor of the genre. The reference edition is Samuel Pegge's (London, 1780), which gave the manuscript its modern name.

Llibre del Coch (around 1490, printed in 1520) — The first printed cookbook in Catalan, first edition in Barcelona in 1520, translated into Castilian as early as 1525. Traditionally attributed to Mestre Robert (or Robert de Nola), cook of Ferdinand I of Naples (1458–1494), natural son of Alfonso the Magnanimous; some researchers propose Manuel Dieç, steward of Alfonso the Magnanimous, as the real author, with Mestre Robert serving only as a copyist. The work, which comprises more than 200 chapters and 236 recipes, draws on elements of the Llibre de Sent Soví and extends them to the Occitan, Italian, and Arab cuisines of the Crown of Aragon. It contains the first written description in Catalan of a botifarró (blood sausage). Cinnamon and clove (clauells de girofle) hold a central place in sauces, desserts, and menjar blanc (Catalan almond blancmange), testifying to Catalonia’s early access to Eastern spices through Mediterranean trade. This extensive use of spices, which the contemporary butifarra negra still retains, makes the Llibre del Coch one of the most important culinary sources of the Iberian Peninsula at the turn of the Renaissance. Reference edition: Joan Santanach, Editorial Barcino, 2019.

Stanisław Czerniecki, Compendium ferculorum, albo Zebranie potraw (Kraków, 1682) — The first printed Polish cookbook, written by the head cook of the voivode of Kraków, Aleksander Michał Lubomirski. The work, structured in three chapters of a hundred recipes (meats, fish, dairy and desserts) with added supplements, testifies to a baroque cooking in which the abundance of spices, sweet-and-sour marriages and a profusion of fat coexist. It contains the first written mention of bigos, a stew of cabbage and minced meats in which kiełbasa holds an essential place, and attests to the long-standing status of the Polish sausage as a staple food.

Le Cuisinier gascon (Amsterdam [Paris], 1740) — An anonymous culinary treatise attributed to Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, Prince de Dombes, which contains the first documented mention in French of the dish ‘à la chipolata’. The term then designates a garnish of chicken wings with small onions and small sausages, the name characterising the whole dish and not the sausage alone. The modern sense of ‘chipolata’, as a fine pork sausage, would establish itself only in the nineteenth century.

De Volmaakte Geldersche Keuken-meyd (Nijmegen, 1756) — An anonymous cookbook published by Hendrik Heymans in the province of Guelders, belonging to the Dutch genre of the keukenmeidenboeken (‘kitchen-maids’ books’). The detailed instructions for smoking sausages over oak or beech wood in the chimney constitute one of the earliest technical descriptions of the Guelders rookworst, which became an emblem of Dutch cooking, associated with the stamppot.

Alexandre Dumas, Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (Paris, Alphonse Lemerre, 1873) — An encyclopaedic work of nearly three thousand recipes, co-signed with the chef Denis-Joseph Vuillemot, written by Dumas in 1869. It contains articles on charcuterie, cervelas, saucisson, chipolata, and andouilles and andouillettes, which document the state of French charcuterie at the hinge of the Second Empire and the Third Republic, just before industrialisation.

Pellegrino Artusi, La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (Florence, self-published, 1891) — The canonical book of unified Italian cooking, self-published by a bourgeois Romagnol gastronome who had never cooked. Over fifteen editions, personally revised by the author until his death in 1911, the number of recipes rose from 475 to 790, several of which concern salsiccia, mortadella, and cotechino. Artusi mixes technical prescriptions, personal anecdotes and remarks on the table, in a clear Italian conceived to speak to domestic cooks throughout the peninsula.

Auguste Escoffier, Le Guide culinaire. Aide-mémoire de cuisine pratique (Paris, Bureaux de l’Art Culinaire, 1903) — A restaurant cookery manual written by Escoffier with the collaboration of Philéas Gilbert and Émile Fétu, from his experience in the grand hotels Savoy, Ritz and Carlton. Sausages and charcuterie are not the subject of a separate chapter, but appear through the ‘sausage meat’ used as a stuffing (lean pork and fatback in equal parts, salt, pepper, spices) and through the use of smoked sausages or blood sausage in the garnishes of consommés and other preparations, which testifies to the integration of charcuterie into French haute cuisine of the Belle Époque.

Scholarly sources: philology, history, archaeology of food

Marcus Terentius Varro, De lingua latina (first century BC) — A treatise on the Latin language in which Varro explains, in Book V, paragraph 111, that the Roman soldiers learned to make among the Lucanians a sausage that they brought back to Rome under the name carne lucanica. It is the most precise primary source on the mechanism of this sausage's transmission: the Roman army, from the third century BC, brought back to Rome a technique learned during the campaigns of conquest in Lucania.

Mahmud al-Kashgari, Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk (1072–1074) — The first dictionary of the Turkic languages, compiled by a scholar native of Kashgar and dedicated to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad in 1077. It contains the first known written mention, in a Turkic language, of a dried sausage, designated by an Old Turkic term, the direct linguistic ancestor of the modern sucuk and its variants.

Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (eds), Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris, 1751–1772; 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates) — The anonymous article ‘cervelat’, which appeared in volume II (1751) under the heading ‘Chaircuiterie’, describes the making in terms close to contemporary French practice: lean pork, veal, fatback and spices chopped together, then stuffed into a hog casing divided into portions by strings, and cooked before sale. The article also gives a recipe called ‘de Milan’ (pork, fatback, salt, spices, pig’s brain) in which the brain, an accessory ingredient that gives the product its name, is explicitly mentioned.

Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris, Armand Colin, 1949) — The founding thesis of the Annales school, defended by Fernand Braudel (1902–1986) in 1947. The work documents the Mediterranean trade routes (wheat, salt, spices, silk), human migrations, and the circulation of techniques, shedding light on the diffusion of charcuterie traditions across the Mediterranean Sea — from Iberian salted meats to Levantine sausages. The book draws on this analysis to describe the Mediterranean as a coherent system of exchanges.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) — A study by the Russian critic and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), published in Russian in 1965 and translated into French in 1970. Bakhtin analyses the culture of popular laughter, carnival, and the ‘bodily lower stratum’ through the works of Rabelais and the medieval festival. The book draws on this analysis to situate the sausage in the comic and carnivalesque register, as an emblem of the flesh opposed to abstinence.

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Paris, Seuil, ‘Tel Quel’, 1980) — Essay by the philosopher, psychoanalyst and linguist Julia Kristeva (born 1941). She names ‘abject’ what the body expels and rejects: blood, humours, waste, which, by threatening the boundary between self and the rest, arouses both disgust and fascination. The book borrows this notion to describe what the sausage does: to place back at the centre of the plate a matter, blood and viscera, that the food order ordinarily keeps at bay.

Prosper Montagné (ed.), Larousse gastronomique (Paris, Librairie Larousse, 1938) — A culinary encyclopaedia directed by Prosper Montagné (1865–1948), a Carcassonne chef, with the collaboration of Dr Alfred Gottschalk and a preface by Auguste Escoffier and Philéas Gilbert. The work codifies French gastronomy in the twentieth century through about 8,500 recipes, including articles devoted to charcuterie, sausages, blood sausages, andouilles and andouillettes that draw up a state of the French charcuterie nomenclature of the interwar period. The later editions widened the coverage to non-French products.

Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, Histoire naturelle et morale de la nourriture (Paris, Bordas, ‘Cultures’, 1987) — A synthesis by the French historian Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat (1926–2018), a specialist in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. Rather than a linear chronology, the work is composed of thematic monographs by families of foods, in which technical history, anthropology, symbolism and anecdote intertwine. Several chapters bear on meat, salt, spices and the techniques of preservation.

Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari (eds), Histoire de l’alimentation (Paris, Fayard, 1996) — A collective work directed by the French Annales historian Jean-Louis Flandrin (1931–2001) and the Italian medievalist Massimo Montanari (University of Bologna), regarded as a landmark of the history of food as an academic discipline. More than forty contributions address European and Mediterranean food from its origins to the end of the twentieth century, with several chapters devoted to meat, charcuterie, and the practices of preservation.

Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari, La cucina italiana. Storia di una cultura (Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1999) — A cultural history of Italian cooking by Alberto Capatti, former editor-in-chief of La Gola and president of the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo, and Massimo Montanari, professor of the history of food at Bologna. The work retraces the gradual formation of a unified Italian culinary tradition from a regional patchwork, attending to the use of the fork, the place of bread and pasta, and the relations between popular and court cooking. Several developments bear on salsiccia and mortadella in the context of regional cuisines and the construction of a national identity through the arts of the table.

Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1st ed. 1999; 3rd ed. revised by Tom Jaine, 2014, 960 pp.) — A food encyclopaedia written for the most part by the former British diplomat and writer Alan Davidson (1924–2003), with some 2,650 entries, the fruit of more than twenty years’ work arising from the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. The successive editions were augmented and revised by Tom Jaine, who added new entries and updated the text without altering its original voice. The volume contains articles on charcuterie, sausage, blood sausages, haggis, salami, mortadella, and Frankfurter, regarded as references in the Anglophone world.

Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas (eds), The Cambridge World History of Food (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, 2 volumes, 2,153 pp.) — A reference academic encyclopaedia gathering 224 contributors from fifteen countries. The volumes cover the food of prehistoric humans, the great staple foods, drinks, nutrients and food-related pathologies, the cuisines continent by continent, and the contemporary questions of nutrition and food policy.

Jean Bottéro, La plus vieille cuisine du monde (Paris, Louis Audibert, 2002, 203 pp.; paperback reissue, Points/Seuil, 2006) — A general-audience synthesis by the French Assyriologist (1914–2007), which gathers and narrates the results of his earlier scholarly work on the Mesopotamian culinary texts, notably his reference edition, Textes culinaires mésopotamiens. The work contains the full translation of the three tablets of the Yale Babylonian Collection and sets the recipes in their cultural context: rites of the table, use of wine and beer, status of cooks, and relations between cooking and life and death in Babylon at the start of the second millennium BC.

Madeleine Ferrières, Histoire des peurs alimentaires. Du Moyen Âge à l’aube du XXe siècle (Paris, Seuil, ‘L’Univers historique’, 2002, 478 pp.) — A study by the modern-history historian of the University of Avignon, which takes meat as the guiding thread of a long analysis of the medieval butchery regulations, the separation of the trades of butcher and charcutier, the municipal inspection controls, the successive edicts on the wholesomeness of meats and the great panics linked to tainted meats, bovine epizootics and tuberculosis. The work sheds light on the sanitary, legal and corporate context in which charcuterie constituted itself as a distinct trade in Western Europe.

Andrew Dalby, Food in the Ancient World from A to Z (London, Routledge, 2003) — An encyclopaedia of Greco-Roman food written by the British linguist and historian Andrew Dalby (born 1947), founded on classical literature, history and archaeology. Among its hundreds of entries figure several Roman sausages documented by the Latin sources — lucanica, botulus, tomaculum, tuccetum — the lucanica being described by Dalby as one of the oldest specific recipes whose name is still in use.

Gary Paul Nabhan, Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity (Washington, Island Press, 2004) — An ethnobotanical essay by Gary Paul Nabhan, an American researcher at the University of Arizona, which explores the coevolution between human genetics and ancestral diets. His chapter on hot spices sheds light on their antimicrobial role in preserving meats in hot climates, which is key to understanding why certain Mediterranean and tropical charcuteries (chorizo, nduja, merguez) developed such highly seasoned, aromatic profiles.

Daniel Serra and Hanna Tunberg, An Early Meal: A Viking Age Cookbook & Culinary Odyssey (Furulund, ChronoCopia Publishing, 2013, 192 pp.) — A work of experimental culinary archaeology devoted to the Scandinavian food of the Viking Age (around 793–1066), written by Daniel Serra, an experimental culinary archaeologist, and Hanna Tunberg, an archaeologist and taster, from the archaeological finds, the sagas and experimental archaeology. The first part describes the techniques of meat preservation — drying, smoking, salting, preservation in whey, and lacto-fermentation — that are the ancestors of Scandinavian sausages. Serra challenges the hypothesis that the Vikings introduced cardamom to Scandinavia and proposes an alternative route via Moorish Iberia, London, and the Hanseatic network.

Ursula Heinzelmann, Beyond Bratwurst: A History of Food in Germany (London, Reaktion Books, ‘Foods and Nations’, 2014) — A history of German food by Ursula Heinzelmann, a food journalist and independent historian based in Berlin. The work runs through two thousand five hundred years of regional, political and socio-economic evolutions, from the cereal north to the pork south, from the back-to-the-land movement of the nineteenth century to the shortages of the two world wars and contemporary mass consumption. Several developments illuminate the place of pork and the Wurst in the construction of German food identity.

Alain Testart, L’amazone et la cuisinière. Anthropologie de la division sexuelle du travail (Paris, Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque des sciences humaines’, 2014) — A posthumous essay by the anthropologist Alain Testart (1945–2013), research director at the CNRS. He argues that the division of tasks between men and women owes less to physical strength than to a set of beliefs linked to blood, which keep women away from the activities in which blood is shed — hunting, war, killing — more than from its transformation.

Professional manuals and techniques of charcuterie

Louis-François Dronne, Charcuterie ancienne et moderne. Traité historique et pratique (Paris, Eugène Lacroix, 1869) — A reference professional manual for nineteenth-century French charcuterie, written by a practising charcutier, corresponding member of the Agricultural Society of Louhans. The work codifies the techniques of making and cooking charcuterie and reproduces the laws, ordinances, and statutes of the profession; it was published at the seat of the Trade Union of the Charcuterie Business.

Fernand Michel, Le Répertoire de la charcuterie. Sélection de 180 recettes pratiques et classiques (Paris, Flammarion, 1933, 280 pp.) — A professional treatise gathering 180 recipes, classified into seven sections: salted meats, garnishes, pâtés, condiments, varieties, cooked dishes, and tripe, prefaced by M. Jumin, president of the Federation of French Charcuterie. The work constitutes a photograph of French charcuterie of the interwar period, before mechanisation and the generalised introduction of curing salt in the second half of the twentieth century.

Paul-Éléonore Laloue, La Charcuterie des ménages (Paris, Garnier Frères, 1942) and Le Guide de la charcuterie. Aide-mémoire de charcuterie pratique (Montreuil-sous-Bois, 1950) — Two professional manuals that mark the transition between the old treatises of practical charcuterie of the nineteenth century and the more scientific works of the second half of the twentieth.

Jane Grigson, Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery (London, Michael Joseph, 1967) — The first reference work in English on French charcuterie, the fruit of four years of research in French technical manuals conducted by Jane Grigson (1928–1990). The work opens with a guide to the charcutier’s shop, then details the pâtés, hams, andouillettes, boudins blancs and boudins noirs, and the techniques for equipment, salting, and cooking pork.

Antony and Araminta Hippisley Coxe, Antony & Araminta Hippisley Coxe’s Book of Sausages (London, Victor Gollancz, 1987; augmented edition of The Book of the Sausage, 1978) — An anglophone encyclopaedia of the sausages of the world by a couple of British gastronomes, organised in four parts: regional dishes, making, world panorama and international glossary. The work describes the history and ingredients of nearly six hundred varieties and offers some sixty recipes, with a point of view marked by the traditions of the British Isles.

Mary Jewry (compiler), Warne’s Model Cookery and Housekeeping Book (London, Frederick Warne & Co., 1868) — A Victorian domestic manual compiled and edited by Mary Jewry for the publisher Frederick Warne & Co. The work gathers about three thousand recipes and a complete apparatus of housekeeping, table service and the conduct of servants. The chapter devoted to pork contains a substantial set of cased recipes: Sausages of Pork (two variants), Oxford Sausages (with and without skin), The Cambridge Sausage, Bologna Sausages (two variants, smoked like hams), Saveloys, and Black Puddings and White Puddings in the French and English manner. Available in open access on the Internet Archive.

Rytek Kutas, Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing (Buffalo, Richard S. Kutas, 1st ed. 1976; revised ed., The Sausage Maker, 1984; 4th ed. 2008) — A reference manual in English on sausage-making and curing, written by Rytek Kutas, an American sausage maker of Polish origin and founder of the mail-order house The Sausage Maker in Buffalo. The work covers fresh, smoked, cooked and dry sausages, natural and synthetic casings, and the techniques of stuffing, smoking and drying.

Astri Riddervold and Andreas Ropeid (eds), Food Conservation: Ethnological Studies (London, Prospect Books, 1988, 224 pp.) — A collection of the twenty-four papers of the 7th International Congress of Food Ethnology, held at Sogndal (Norway) in 1987. Astri Riddervold (1925–2017), a Norwegian ethnologist and a leading authority on the traditional preservation of foods in pre-industrial Norway, gathered technical studies on the European and North American practices of drying, smoking, salting and lacto-fermentation of meats — techniques that constitute the direct ancestors of the Scandinavian, Baltic and Slavic sausages.

Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly, Bruce Aidells’s Complete Sausage Book (Berkeley, Ten Speed Press, 2000) — A revised edition of Hot Links and Country Flavours (New York, Knopf, 1990). Bruce Aidells, a former postdoctoral researcher in endocrinology turned charcutier, founded the Aidells Sausage Company in San Francisco in 1983; with Denis Kelly he drew up a world inventory of sausages — European, American and Asian varieties — defining each type, detailing its origin and making, and offering the associated recipes.

Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn, Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing (New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2005) — A reference work on charcuterie in English, prefaced by Thomas Keller and written by Michael Ruhlman, an author and food critic, and Brian Polcyn, professor of charcuterie at Schoolcraft College in Livonia. The 140 recipes cover salting, smoking, confit and pâtés, with a chapter dedicated to fresh sausages and emulsions. Regarded as one of the founding texts of the revival of artisanal charcuterie in the United States.

Bruce Kraig, Hot Dog: A Global History (London, Reaktion Books, ‘Edible’, 2009, 144 pp.) — A history of the hot dog by Bruce Kraig, professor emeritus of history at Roosevelt University in Chicago and founder of the Culinary Historians of Chicago. The work retraces the transformation of the German Wienerwurst and Frankfurter into a popular American food at the end of the nineteenth century, dismantles the apocryphal narratives (origin of the name, legend of the hot-dog bun) and compares the American regional variants (Chicago dog, New York dog, Southern corn dog, Southwestern chilli dog).

Stanley Marianski and Adam Marianski, Home Production of Quality Meats and Sausages (Bookmagic, LLC, 2010) — A scientific reference manual in English on the home production of meats and sausages by Stanley Marianski, born in Poland, and his son Adam. The 172 recipes are preceded by explanatory chapters on the science of meat, lactic fermentation, the chemistry of smoking and the physics of drying. The same authors, with Miroslaw Gebarowski, published Polish Sausages: Authentic Recipes and Instructions (Bookmagic, 2009), which contains more than seventy recipes from the standardised official Polish manuals.

Jeffrey Weiss, Charcutería: The Soul of Spain (Chicago, Surrey Books / Agate, 2014, 462 pp.) — The first reference work in English on Spanish charcuterie, prefaced by José Andrés. Jeffrey Weiss, a chef trained in the ICEX programme, presents, by region (Extremadura, Galicia, Castile, Catalonia), the Iberian embutidos, jamones, and terrinas, and provides more than a hundred traditional recipes, drawing on the ethnographic account of a matanza (ritual pig slaughter).

Gary Allen, Sausage: A Global History (London, Reaktion Books, ‘Edible’, 2015, 160 pp.) — A world survey of sausages by Gary Allen, adjunct professor at Empire State College (State University of New York) and former vice-president of the Association for the Study of Food and Society. The work runs through the great families of sausages region by region, from the German sulzwurst to the Lebanese makanek, from the Turkish sucuk to the Kazakh kazy or the Thai sai krok lueat, with historical illustrations and a selection of old and original recipes.

Erich Lissner, Wurstologia, oder Es geht um die Wurst. Eine Monographie über die Wurst (Frankfurt am Main, Hauserpresse, 1939, 250 pp.) — A German monograph devoted to the sausage, written by Erich Lissner for the chemical firm Kalle & Co. of Wiesbaden-Biebrich, which produced in particular artificial casings. The work gathers in a single volume a cultural history of the German Wurst, a directory of the principal regional varieties (from the Franconian Bratwurst to the Westphalian Mettwurst by way of the Berlin Knackwurst), literary anecdotes (Goethe, Bismarck) and a glossary. A second volume, Das Jahr des Metzgers, appeared in 1957. Cited by Alan Davidson in the Oxford Companion to Food as the reference work on German sausages.

Stefano Asaro, Vincenzo Bordo, Giovanni Mojoli and Armando Surrasca (eds), Salumi d’Italia. Storia, produzione, assaggio (Bra, Slow Food Editore, 2007; augmented reissue 2014, 320 pp.) — The most complete inventory of traditional Italian charcuterie, published by Slow Food Editore in the framework of the defence of the products of the Slow Food Presidium. The introductory part presents the families of salumi, the ageing techniques, the professional lexicon and the tasting protocols. There follow 209 entries on regional products — including fresh sausages, blood sausages and cotechini — detailing, for each, the origin, the history, the techniques of making and the gastronomic uses, from the best-known (mortadella, cotechino, zampone) to the rarest, threatened with disappearance.

Fergus Henderson, Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking (London, Macmillan, 1999) — A cookbook by the British chef Fergus Henderson (born 1963), founder of the restaurant St John in London, near the former Smithfield meat market, in 1994. Henderson defends the use of the whole beast, offal included, which he sums up in the idea that it would be dishonest towards the animal not to make full use of it. Reissued in the United States under the title The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating (2004), the work rekindled interest in offal among anglophone cooks and illustrated the contemporary promotion of a matter long reserved for the poorest.

Regulatory documents and administrative archives

Novel of Leo VI the Wise prohibiting blood as food (Byzantine Empire, around 900) — One of the Novels, or Constitutions, promulgated by the Byzantine emperor Leo VI the Wise (886–912) forbids the preparation of food from blood, in the name of the prohibition inherited from the Mosaic law and the apostolic decision of the Acts of the Apostles. The measure aims at blood-sausage-type preparations. Contrary to the widespread tradition that makes it a response to poisonings, its motive is explicitly religious.

Municipal archives of Nuremberg (1313) — A statute of the Nuremberg town council dated 1313 mentions for the first time a bratwurst. It prescribes for butchers the exclusive use of finely minced pork loin and establishes a body of inspectors charged with controlling its composition. An accounting mention from 1404, discovered at Arnstadt (Thuringia), has, since 2000, revived the regional debate on the antiquity of bratwurst.

Expulsion edict of Manuel I of Portugal (5 December 1496) — A royal decree ordering the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Portugal, transformed in October 1497 into a decree of forced conversion after the closure of the ports. It is at the origin of the development, by the cristãos-novos, of a charcuterie whose appearance imitated pork charcuterie, but whose historical composition contained no pork, in order to deceive the Portuguese Inquisition instituted in 1536.

Archives and chronicles of Mirandola (1510–1511) — The siege of Mirandola by the troops of Julius II, from 19 December 1510 to 20 January 1511, is abundantly documented in contemporary chronicles, but none of these sources mentions a culinary invention linked to the event. The tradition associating the invention of the zampone with the siege — by the regent Francesca Trivulzio, who is said to have had the skin of the trotter stuffed to preserve the meat in a besieged town — appears for the first time in L’economia del cittadino in villa by Vincenzo Tanara (1644), more than 130 years later. The episode is still cited as a founding narrative in the presentation documents for the Zampone Modena PGI.

Bando of Cardinal Girolamo Farnese (24 October 1661) — Under the title Bando e provisione sopra la fabbrica delle Mortadelle e salami, Cardinal Girolamo Farnese (1599–1668), papal legate at Bologna, had published a regulation that prohibited the use of any meat other than pork in the mortadella, reserved its making to the members of the Arte dei Salaroli and imposed their seal of guarantee on the mortadellas exported. This text is regarded as one of the oldest precursors of the PGI product specifications. A second edict of the cardinal legate Curzio Origo (11 November 1720) would confirm its provisions. The mortadella di Bologna was recognised as a European PGI in 1998; 24 October is celebrated in Italy as Mortadella Day in memory of the edict.

Berlin Decree (21 November 1806) — A Napoleonic decree establishing the Continental Blockade against the United Kingdom. The resulting disruption of the black-pepper supply in Hungary accelerated the generalisation of local paprika, which the Ottomans had introduced in the sixteenth century and adopted in peasant kitchens during the eighteenth century. This gradual shift contributed to the stabilisation, in the nineteenth century, of the aromatic profile of the kolbász and the goulash — the decree being regarded by historians as an accelerator rather than a trigger.

Archives of the Falun copper mine (seventeenth to nineteenth century) — The archives of Stora Kopparberget, in the seventeenth century one of the principal mines of Europe, document the context of the genesis of the falukorv: the oxen that worked the winches supplied hides for the mining ropes, and their meat, salted and smoked, served to make sausages, techniques in part imported by the German miners. The first printed mention of the name Fahlu Korf, however, does not appear until 1834 in the regional newspaper Stora Kopparbergs Län, which reported the dispatch of large quantities of this smoked sausage to Stockholm. The modern recipe was codified in the 1870s by the butcher Anders Olsson. The falukorv has held a Swedish protection since 1973 and, since 2001, has held the status of European Traditional Speciality Guaranteed.

Archives and photographs of the Narashino camp (1918) — In the German prisoner-of-war camp of Narashino (Chiba prefecture, 1915–1920), the master charcutier Karl Jahn and several other prisoners transmitted in 1918 their techniques to the Japanese official Yoshifusa Iida (1876–1976), an engineer at the National Institute of Animal Industry of Chiba. Yoshifusa Iida then shared his know-how with the country's meat processors, documenting the origins of the modern Japanese charcuterie industry. Ten photographs of the camp, taken in 1918, were made public in 2008.

Chillup trademark (Berlin, 1958–1959) — On 21 January 1959, the sauce of the currywurst created on 4 September 1949 by Herta Heuwer (née Pöppel, Königsberg 1913 – Berlin 1999) at her stand located at the corner of the Kantstraße and the Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße in Charlottenburg, was registered as a trademark under the name Chillup at the German Patent Office in Munich, under the number 721319 (filed in February 1958). Heuwer had composed her sauce by mixing ketchup, Worcestershire sauce and curry powder, obtained from British soldiers, and took the precise recipe to her grave. Competing claims at Duisburg and Hamburg lack equivalent contemporary documentation.

Order creating the doktorskaya kolbasa and the GOST 23670 standard (1936–1979) — On 29 April 1936, Anastas Mikoyan (Sanahin, Armenia, 1895 – Moscow, 1978), People’s Commissar for the Food Industry of the USSR, signed the order creating the doktorskaya kolbasa, following a study trip to Chicago in the early 1930s. The recipe, developed by the Research Institute of the Meat Industry (VNIIMP), originally comprised about 25 per cent beef, 70 per cent pork, 3 per cent eggs and 2 per cent milk, flavoured only with nutmeg and cardamom — without garlic or paprika — to suit a ‘recovery diet’. A 1974 evolution authorised 2 per cent starch or flour, consolidated in the GOST 23670-79 published in 1979. Deeper substitutions (soy protein, carrageenans, poultry) became general after 1991. The standard was revised in 2019 (GOST 23670-2019). The controversy between the defenders of the original formula and the contemporary producers persists in the debates on Russian charcuterie.

Przepisy Wewnętrzne nr 16 (1959) — Internal Instructions no. 16 — A collection of recipes and abridged instructions for charcuterie and charcuterie products intended for the domestic market, a normative document published by the Centralny Zarząd Przemysłu Mięsnego (Central Board of the Meat Industry) of the People’s Republic of Poland. Familiarly called szesnastka (‘the sixteen’), it imposed a single recipe for each product on all Polish charcuterie, with no variation permitted. In its logic comparable to the Soviet GOST, it constitutes today a historical source on the state of Polish charcuterie at the end of the 1950s, before the post-1989 transformations.

Code of usages of charcuterie, of salted meats and of preserved meats (first edition 1968) — A French professional reference that codifies the usages of manufacture and sets the conditions to be met for a product to bear one of the some 450 denominations of French charcuterie, divided into sixteen technological families. Established at the end of the 1960s — 1968 according to the IFIP, which today ensures its writing and diffusion. It was long held by the Technical Centre for Salted Meats, Charcuterie and Preserved Meats (CTSCCV, Maisons-Alfort) and now falls to the Association Savoir-Faire Charcutier Français, which gathers the FICT and CNCT federations. It has no value as a regulatory text: when presented to the DGCCRF, it serves as a reference, under the courts' control, for assessing the fair and marketable character of the products, within the framework established by European Regulation 1169/2011 on usual denominations.

Regulation R.2718 on boerewors (23 November 1990) — Regulations Governing the Composition and Labelling of Raw Boerewors, Raw Species Sausage and Raw Mixed-Species Sausage, published by the Minister of National Health and Population Development under the Foodstuffs, Cosmetics and Disinfectants Act (Act No. 54 of 1972). The text defines what may bear the name boerewors: a minimum of 90 per cent beef, sheep, pork or goat meat, a maximum of 30 per cent fat, a prohibition of offal (except as casing), of mechanically separated meats, of artificial colourants and of added vegetable or dairy proteins; cereals, starch, vinegar, spices and herbs remain permitted. One of the rare legal protections of a sausage in Africa.

Inventory of the intangible cultural heritage in France, entry ‘Le tue-cochon’ (Ministry of Culture, 2012) — A notice of the National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage describing the domestic slaughter of the pig as a social and festive practice. It details the division of tasks within the household, the killing and cutting entrusted to the men, the preparations and recipes entrusted to the women, and the collective character of the event and its family transmission.

Places

Archaeological Museum of Bologna (Museo Civico Archeologico) — Houses two sandstone funerary stelae from the Roman imperial period (probably Augustan), discovered in the Muro del Reno, a dyke brought to light in 1894 along the river Reno on the outskirts of Bologna. Supposed to come from the same funerary monument, one represents a herder leading seven pigs to pasture, the other a mortar (mortarium) with its pestle. Giancarlo Susini, professor of ancient history at the University of Bologna, saw in it the first material representation of a mortadella production in the Roman period, and a possible confirmation of the etymology that derives the name of the salume from the Latin mortarium, the tool used to pound meat, salt and spices before stuffing.

Deutsches Currywurst Museum (Berlin-Mitte, 2009–2018) — A museum inaugurated on 15 August 2009 at Schützenstraße 70, a few steps from Checkpoint Charlie, sixty years after the invention of the currywurst by Herta Heuwer in 1949. Founded by Martin Löwer following a trip to Jamaica, where he had visited a museum devoted to the yam, the establishment offered an interactive tour (Saucentrail, the video game Curry Up!, a sausage-shaped sofa, singing ketchup bottles) and offered a currywurst to each visitor. It welcomed about 350,000 visitors a year, for a total exceeding a million before its definitive closure in 2018, not for want of the public, but due to the non-renewal of the commercial lease; the collections were stored in view of a hypothetical travelling exhibition.

Geographical protections and regulatory frameworks

eAmbrosia database — European register of geographical indications (European Commission, online, continuously updated) — The official and public register of the denominations protected by the European Union under regulations EU no. 1151/2012 (agricultural products and foodstuffs), no. 1308/2013 (wines) and no. 2019/787 (spirit drinks). For each denomination — PDO, PGI or TSG — the database provides the date of registration, the delimited zone, the complete product specification and the history of modifications. A reference tool for verifying the legal status and geographical scope of the European sausages cited in this collection (Mortadella Bologna, Zampone Modena, Boudin blanc de Rethel, Stornoway Black Pudding, Falukorv, Kabanosy, Csabai and Gyulai kolbász, Skilandis, etc.). Accessible at ec.europa.eu/agriculture/eambrosia.

The collection regularly mentions geographical protections, without always specifying what they cover. This section gathers the elements needed for the reader to find their bearings.

The PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) is the strictest: all stages of production, processing, and preparation must take place within the delimited zone, and the product's characteristics are essentially or exclusively due to the terroir.

The PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) is more flexible: at least one stage of production, processing or preparation takes place in the zone, and a link between the product and the territory must be established (reputation, quality, character).

The TSG (Traditional Speciality Guaranteed) protects a recipe or a mode of making whose composition or method has been traditional for at least thirty years, without geographical condition.

Outside Europe, the systems are less unified.

China has developed, since the early 2000s, its own framework for geographical indications, managed by several national administrations, which today covers several thousand agricultural products, including a growing number of regional charcuterie.

South Africa protects the boerewors by a national regulation (R.2718 of 1990, replaced by R.2410 of 2022) that follows not a geographical but a compositional logic.

Peru has a Denominación de Origen system administered by INDECOPI, but it covers no charcuterie; the salchicha de Huacho, despite its renown, is not protected.

In addition to the European categories, Spain uses the Real Decreto 4/2014, which classifies products of Iberian pork according to three feeding designations (bellota, cebo de campo, cebo), identified by four coloured seals, with black reserved for 100 per cent Iberian bellota, essentially for dried products.

Professional and associative labels

Several sausages of the book are governed not by an official geographical protection, but by labels awarded by professional associations, brotherhoods or collective initiatives. These labels have no regulatory value in the European sense, but in practice they function as quality guarantees recognised by professionals and consumers. They are numerous, and the list is far from exhaustive. A few illustrative examples follow:

AAAAA — The Association Amicale des Amateurs d’Andouillette Authentique, founded in 1970, awards a label that distinguishes high-quality artisanal andouillettes. A 5A-labelled andouillette is made of hand-pulled pig’s chitterlings, without the addition of substitute offal. The best-known label of French charcutiers, outside the PGI system.

‘Véritable Saucisse de Toulouse’ label (2001) — Governs, on a voluntary basis, the productions that conform to the traditional criteria: coarse mincing by knife or wide plate, French pork, seasoning with salt and pepper. The Confrérie de la Véritable Saucisse de Toulouse watches over the respect for the recipe. The absence of a PGI means that any maker may market a sausage under the name ‘Toulouse’ without respecting these criteria.

Confrérie des Chevaliers du Goûte-Boudin — Founded in 1963 at Mortagne-au-Perche, it organises each year on the third weekend of March an international boudin noir fair that welcomes about 25,000 visitors and a competition gathering producers from several countries. Without a normative function, competition helps maintain quality standards through emulation.

Great British Banger — An annual competition that rewards the best artisanal sausages across several categories. It is organised by the National Craft Butchers (formerly the National Federation of Meat and Food Traders) and, in the United Kingdom, plays a role comparable to that of the French brotherhoods: promoting artisanal production against industry, without regulatory power.

Private product specifications for the paio (Alentejo) — Producer associations in the Alentejo have drawn up private product specifications for the paio, requiring the use of Iberian pigs from the region and a minimum of oak-smoking, pending the outcome of the PGI application.

Boudin Trail (Louisiana) — A gastronomic itinerary that lists several hundred establishments selling their own Cajun boudin between Lafayette and Lake Charles. Specialist guides and blogs compare the productions according to precise criteria: rice/meat ratio, chilli level, casing texture, freshness. This culture of popular evaluation, without an official label, constitutes the Cajun equivalent of the British competitions.

Sámi discussions (Finland, Sweden, Norway) — The Sámi herders’ associations have engaged since the 2010s in discussions on a possible geographical indication for reindeer products, without an outcome to date.

Unsuccessful applications and unprotected products

Several sausages in the book have been the subject of unsuccessful protection applications. The best-documented case is that of the Lincolnshire Sausage, whose PGI application was rejected in 2012 on the grounds that the name was already used by industrial makers throughout Britain, without an established link to the county. The andouillette de Troyes, despite its renown, benefits from no European geographical protection, no more than the saucisse de Toulouse, the saucisse de Strasbourg, the merguez or the loukaniko.

The absence of geographical protection does not mean that the product is of lesser importance. It most often reflects one of three situations: a name too widespread to be legally recoverable (Lincolnshire, Strasbourg, Toulouse), an oral tradition that has not been the subject of the necessary administrative process (most of the sausages of Africa, Asia and Oceania), or a product whose internal diversity resists codification in a single product specification (the andouillette, the loukaniko, the French boudin noir).

The chapter ‘The circulations’ addresses this question in its passage devoted to the national standardisations. It opposes two logics: European protection, which fixes a diversity already present, and, by contrast, Soviet standardisation, which imposes uniformity. The contrast is illustrated by the GOST and the doktorskaya kolbasa.