Introduction

Animal domestication

The Fertile Crescent is the best-known hearth of domestication and, probably, the cradle of the oldest charcuterie. It forms an arc running from eastern Anatolia to the Iranian Zagros, where domestication began.

Goats came first, managed in herds in the Zagros valleys a little more than 10,000 years ago (Ganj Dareh, western Iran). Sheep followed within the same centuries, in central and eastern Anatolia.

Cattle, for their part, were domesticated around 8000 BC between Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia, with a possible independent hearth in north-east Africa whose existence remains disputed.

The pig was domesticated around 8500 BC in the basins of the Upper Tigris and Upper Euphrates, from the wild boar (Sus scrofa). The process was neither instantaneous nor linear. The archaeozoological evidence shows a progressive management of wild boar populations, with growing control over breeding and feeding over several centuries, before the emergence of the morphological markers of domestication: reduced overall size, shortened canines, and a less elongated skull.

Goats, sheep, cattle and pigs gathered within a confined space probably created the conditions needed for the invention of charcuterie: an abundance of meat, a regular supply of intestines as by-products of slaughter, and the need to preserve meat in a sometimes hot climate. The sausage uses the container (the casing) and the contents (the meat, the blood, the fat) of the same animal, often combining this practice with salting, smoking or drying.

Other hearths of domestication, independent and later, supplied the raw material for distinct charcuterie traditions: the pig in China, where the first indications of domestication date back around 8,000 years; the camelids in the Andes some 5,000 to 4,000 years ago; and finally the horse in the Eurasian steppes, whose hearth or hearths of domestication are still debated.

The first written traces

The earliest written records of elaborate meat cookery come from Mesopotamia. Three Akkadian tablets of fired clay, held in the Yale Babylonian Collection, dated to around 1730 BC and translated by Jean Bottéro, contain some forty recipes (spiced broths, stews, poultry pies) that constitute the oldest known culinary texts. Intestines and paunch appear there as ingredients in certain broths (one recipe mentions ‘salted meat: intestines or paunch’), attesting to an already sophisticated use of offal. None of them, however, describes the stuffing process that would later define the sausage in the technical sense.

One sometimes reads that the Babylonians were already fermenting meat around 1500 BC, but no primary source confirms it. What is certain is that empirical fermentation techniques are attested in Mesopotamia from the fourth millennium BC for beer and bread; their early application to cased meats is plausible, but remains a hypothesis.

The first written mentions of a cased preparation are found in Greece. The playwright Epicharmus, who lived in Syracuse at the turn of the fifth century BC, is one of the founders of Greek comedy. Among the titles of comedies attributed to him is Orya, from the Greek name of a pork preparation related to the sausage. The play has not come down to us, but the very existence of the title implies that the product was already familiar to the Sicilian public. In 424 BC, Aristophanes put a sausage-seller on stage in The Knights, a political satire that uses the sausage-vendor as an image of popular demagogy. These sources do not describe the process, but their literary ordinariness implies that it was in common use.

In Rome, Varro mentions the lucanica in the first century BC: in his De Lingua Latina he explains that this large stuffed gut owes its name to the Lucanians, a people of southern Italy, whose recipe Roman soldiers brought back from the third century BC onwards. Cicero mentions it in the same period in his Letters to Friends, and Martial at the end of the first century AD in his Epigrams. The later spread of the lucanica and its family of names is traced in the following chapter.

The first technical description of the stuffing process, in the form of detailed recipes, comes later. It appears in De re coquinaria, a compilation assembled between the fourth and fifth centuries AD under the name of Apicius (a Roman gourmet of the first century whose posterity inherited a text that is not his own, but that gathers layers of older culinary material). It contains the recipe for the lucanica, already mentioned by Varro four centuries earlier, along with several other cased preparations.

Other sources, sometimes later but illuminating, are developed in the chapter ‘Supplement’.

The antiquity of blood sausage

At slaughter, blood is the first by-product that must be dealt with. It spoils and coagulates within a few hours, cannot be kept once solidified, and every herding society has had to find a rapid use for it or lose it. This constraint doubtless explains why blood-based preparations are among the earliest to have been set down in writing, and why they are found today on every continent in forms independent of one another.

Several ancient sources document the practice:

• Homer’s Odyssey, towards the end of the eighth century BC, compares Odysseus tossing in his bed to a man turning over the fire a paunch filled with fat and blood (Book XX, lines 25–27). It is the first known literary description of a blood sausage preparation in Western culture.
• In Egypt, the tomb paintings of the New Kingdom abundantly depict the slaughter of cattle and the preparation of meat. Certain scenes have been interpreted as the making of blood sausages from the blood of sacrificial animals, but this reading, common in gastronomic literature, is not formally confirmed by Egyptologists.
• Petronius, in the Satyricon (chapter 49), describes a dinner at the house of the freedman Trimalchio at which the guests are presented with a roast pig that the cook slits open before them: out pours a cascade of sausages, designated by the terms tomacula and botuli. The latter, in the Roman era, designated a family that included blood sausages.

The practice has never ceased. It is found today in the blood sausages this book describes in every geographical zone, from the French boudin noir to the Spanish morcilla, from the Polish kaszanka to the Kenyan mutura, this last made by the herders of East Africa from the blood and offal of their flocks, following the same logic as its European counterparts without any kinship with them.

The antiquity of blood sausage, its early documentation in several cultural areas and its universal persistence constitute one of the strongest indications of the ancient character of stuffing into casings.

Independent hearths

The Graeco-Roman sources document the sausage in the Mediterranean basin, but other cultural areas developed cased preparations according to their own logic, without any established contact with that hearth.

In China, the pig was domesticated in the Yellow River basin and the Yangtze valley. The earliest written attestations of Chinese sausages date to the Wei and Jin dynasties (third to fifth centuries AD), notably in the Qimin Yaoshu, an agricultural encyclopaedia compiled around AD 544 that contains detailed descriptions of cased preparations. The Cantonese lap cheong, whose name joins the twelfth lunar month (là, 臘) to the word for ‘intestine’ (cháng, 腸), is the oldest heir of this tradition. The logic of preservation by desiccation and by the addition of rice wine is the opposite of that of the fresh European sausage, which attests to an independent technical development, built around another family of drying and fermentation techniques.

Further south, in Thai, Lao, Khmer, and Vietnamese cultures, the lactic fermentation of raw cased meat, which today produces the Thai sai krok isan, the Lao som mou, and the Vietnamese nem chua, constitutes a third independent technical tradition. The first printed cookbooks from the area date only to the beginning of the twentieth century, but the techniques they describe presuppose pre-existing know-how rooted in the old agrarian economies. This tradition rests on aromatic bases of its own (lemongrass, galangal, fish sauce) that distinguish it from both Chinese and Mediterranean fermentation.

The Turkic peoples of the Central Asian steppes stuffed horse meat into casings, giving rise to the ancestors of the Kazakh kazy. The Turkic word for this product is recorded as early as the eleventh century in the Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk of Mahmud al-Kashgari, a dictionary of the Turkic languages written for the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. This attestation attests to the antiquity of a practice that seems well anterior to its being set down in writing. The tradition belongs to a pastoral and nomadic economy, radically different from the agro-pastoral economy of the Mediterranean.

The communities of sub-Saharan Africa developed their own techniques for using blood and offal, with the mutura among the best-known examples. The antiquity of these practices on the continent remains difficult to establish: written sources are scarce, and documentary scarcity is no indication of actual antiquity.

Parallelisms

Beyond these independent hearths, what is striking is the similarity of the technical solutions devised by civilisations that had no contact with one another. The Uzbek hasip, a gut stuffed with meat, rice and lamb tail fat, then cooked in a flavoured broth, the Egyptian mombar and the Tunisian osban share an identical logic: using the gut as the container for a mixture of grain and meat. No source links these preparations to a common origin. They appear to have emerged in parallel, in cultures facing the same constraints and possessing the same raw materials.

The winter pig slaughter is another example. The practice is universal wherever the pig is raised in a temperate climate, and each regional tradition has coined its own name for the same event: matanza del cerdo in Spain, tumbera in Corsica, tue-cochon in France, zabijačka in Czech, disznóvágás in Hungarian, svinjokolj in Serbian, świniobicie in Polish, Schlachtfest in the German-speaking countries. In each case, a community transforms a whole pig in a day or two, and the blood and offal are immediately turned into blood sausages and sausages. In southern China, it is not the slaughter that is collective but the seasonal production that follows: Cantonese families prepare their lap cheong in the lead-up to the Lunar New Year, taking advantage of the dry, cool winter winds to dry them.

A resemblance between two sausages does not, therefore, attest to a filiation. It may testify to a shared constraint or usage producing, independently of each other, the same solution.

***

The sausage, then, is not an invention that spread from a single point. It is probably a convergent response to a constraint shared by all herding societies: preserving and transforming meat in contexts where refrigeration does not exist and no part of the animal may be wasted.

This world of isolated hearths is the starting point of the next chapter. These hearths would gradually come into contact, first through slow and localised routes and migrations, then through upheavals that, within a few generations, would restructure the geography of the sausage.

The first routes (third century BC – fifteenth century)

The first networks of charcuterie circulation took shape slowly, over centuries, along four axes whose traces are still clearly legible in contemporary recipes. These networks carried armies, merchants, spices and techniques. Sausages travelled with them.

The Roman network

The lucanica, already documented by Varro and Cicero in the first century BC, then by Martial at the end of the first century AD in his Epigrams (‘Sausage of Lucania, daughter of a Picenian sow, I am a delicious garnish for white porridge’), is the sausage whose ancient diffusion is best documented. Its detailed recipe appears in De re coquinaria, the compilation assembled under the name of Apicius (mentioned earlier).

The lucanica stands out for the legibility of its ramifications. Its name was deformed along the paths of Roman diffusion: luganega in Lombardy, longaniza in Spain and the Philippines, linguiça in Portugal and Brazil, loukaniko in Greece, lukanka in Bulgaria. This etymological thread can be followed from the second century BC to the present day in the butchers’ shops of four continents.

The continuity that this etymology suggests should not, however, be overestimated. Between the lucanica described in De re coquinaria and the luganega monzese with Grana Padano, bought by the metre in Lombardy, lie two millennia of transformations.

The etymology attests to the route, not to the recipe itself. The Spanish longaniza with aniseed, the Greek loukaniko with orange and red wine, and the Portuguese linguiça macerated in massa de pimentão have in common only their deformed names and the gesture of stuffing into one long continuous sausage. The Roman network, then, spread a name and a technique, not a fixed recipe.

A Venetian tradition proposes another route: the luganega is said to have come via Greece, brought back from Rhodes by merchants around 1100 as the already transformed loukaniko. This version is difficult to verify, but it shows that products do not always travel in straight lines and can, through unexpected detours, return transformed.

The Viking and Hanseatic network

Cardamom, native to southern India, has been present in the Swedish fläskkorv and in certain Danish sausages since the Middle Ages. How did it reach so far north?

Two hypotheses coexist. Tradition attributes it to the Vikings, who are said to have brought it back from Constantinople along the Russian rivers between the ninth and eleventh centuries. No archaeological evidence and no mention in Viking literature confirm this, as noted by the culinary archaeologist Daniel Serra in An Early Meal. The first mention of cardamom in a Scandinavian text dates from the thirteenth century, in a Danish cookbook whose recipes are close to those of the Moors. Daniel Serra therefore proposes an alternative route: Moorish Iberia, then London, then the Hanseatic network up to Scandinavia. Whatever the exact route, cardamom was in common use in Nordic kitchens by the thirteenth century at the latest.

The attested vector of technical transfer towards the North is the Hanse. This network of merchant cities, dominant between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, spread Germanic smoking and stuffing techniques to Scandinavia. The Danish medisterpølse bears in its name the trace of the Low German mettwurst (mett, minced meat, and wurst, sausage), attesting to a transfer that was at once linguistic and technical. The Swedish falukorv descends from the German sausages introduced into the copper mines of Falun in the sixteenth century by German miners. The first mentions in the Falun archives date from the seventeenth century, and its beef-rich composition is explained by the abundance of oxen used in the mines, whose meat was a by-product.

These contributions were integrated into local traditions by adapting to the resources available. The grains of the North (barley, rye, potato starch) replaced the original Germanic binders. The locally available woods (birch, alder, juniper) produced a smoking profile distinct from that of the beech commonly used in Western Europe. This adaptation is a constant of all the circulations described in this chapter. An imported technique transforms itself within one or two generations under the effect of local raw materials and the tastes of the host community.

The Arab-Mediterranean network

Eight centuries of Arab presence in the Iberian Peninsula (711–1492) left aromatic traces in Iberian sausages that predate the arrival of the American chilli: cumin in certain chorizos of southern Spain, warm spices (cinnamon, clove) in the morcillas of Andalusia, vinegar as a preserving agent in many preparations. The chilli, after 1493, would graft itself onto this foundation rather than replace it. Andalusia, the zone where the Arab presence lasted longest, is also the one where this aromatic heritage is most legible. When a contemporary Andalusian chorizo combines cumin of Arab origin with pimentón of American origin, it superimposes two heritages within a single preparation.

Catalonia illustrates another route of entry. A maritime power whose merchants had plied the eastern Mediterranean since the twelfth century, it had access to Asian spices well before most regions of continental Europe. Medieval Catalan cookery, as documented by the Llibre de Sent Soví (fourteenth century) and then the Llibre del Coch (1520), made abundant use of cinnamon and clove, an aromatic profile that the contemporary butifarra negra preserves six centuries later. The eugenol in clove, beyond its gustatory imprint, possessed antiseptic properties useful in an age without refrigeration, which certainly helped to fix its place in recipes.

The routes of the Indian Ocean extend this network eastwards. The cinnamon of the Lebanese makanek came from Ceylon via the markets of Aleppo. The turmeric of the Iranian sosis bandari illustrates the exchanges between the Persian Gulf and the Indian subcontinent. Cumin, present at once in the Maghrebi merguez, the Lebanese makanek and the Turkish sucuk, testifies to a circulation of spices that ignored frontiers and bound the shores of the Mediterranean into a coherent whole, the one Fernand Braudel described as a system in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.

The Silk Road

Central Asia is the point of passage through which Indian and Chinese spices reached the Mediterranean, and through which Western culinary influences gradually penetrated Asia. Examples abound.

The charcuterie of the nomadic Turkic peoples developed in this space of transit. Zira (Bunium persicum), the wild cumin of the Tian Shan and the Pamir, more intense and slightly camphorated, is present in nearly all Central Asian charcuterie. It grows there; its use is first a geographical inheritance before being an aromatic choice.

The sucuk is the best-documented example of diffusion along this route. This dried beef sausage, spiced with cumin and garlic, is mentioned as early as the eleventh century by Mahmud al-Kashgari in his Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk, which records the term in Old Turkic without specifying the composition. The expansion of the Turkic peoples, first Seljuk and then Ottoman, subsequently spread it towards Anatolia, the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Levant. It is found today in related forms from Beirut to Yerevan, each having evolved according to local traditions.

The Caucasus illustrates what zones of contact between empires produce. The Armenian soudjouk shares a common origin with the Turkish sucuk, but the use of sumac and fenugreek testifies to an evolution proper to Armenia. The Georgian kupati, a sausage of pork and offal with Caucasian spices (coriander, fenugreek, sweet pepper, walnuts), belongs to a cuisine that developed under Persian, Ottoman and Russian influences without losing its own coherence. These preparations are neither copies nor isolated inventions: they are the fruit of centuries of mingling in a space where empires succeeded one another.

The great upheaval (1492 – eighteenth century)

The year 1492 marks the beginning of a period of less than three centuries during which the world’s charcuterie geography was profoundly restructured. Three movements were responsible: the diffusion of the American chilli across three continents, the transplantation of European sausages across the Atlantic, and the arrival of stuffing techniques in territories that did not know them.

The chilli and its three routes

The arrival of the American chilli in 1493 is one of the most decisive factors in all the charcuterie covered in this book.

Introduced to Seville by Christopher Columbus and transformed into pimentón by smoking over the holm-oak wood of Extremadura, it became, within two centuries, the central spice of Iberian charcuterie. Without it, neither the chorizo, nor the sobrasada, nor the chouriço would exist in their present form. The Iberian Peninsula did not merely receive this spice; it transformed it before redistributing it to the rest of the world.

The first route is the shortest. The chilli established itself in Iberian charcuterie in less than two centuries, but not everywhere. The Basque chistorra contains 3.5 per cent pimentón; the Catalan butifarra blanca contains none, preferring its medieval spices inherited from Mediterranean trade. This dividing line between the Iberian cuisines that adopted the chilli and those that did not is one of the sharpest aromatic frontiers in the book. Portugal developed the massa de pimentão in parallel, a paste of salted and reduced red peppers used in nearly all its sausages. Neighbouring Spain possesses a related ingredient, the pulp of the pimiento choricero, but Spanish charcuterie incorporates the red pepper chiefly as ground pimentón rather than as a paste.

The second route is longer. The chilli left Iberia towards the east, was transmitted to the Maghreb via Hispano-Maghrebi trade, and then spread towards the Balkans and Hungary along the corridors of the Ottoman Empire. It arrived in Budapest under the name of törökbors (Turkish pepper), a name that says much about its route and about the misunderstandings that accompanied it: neither pepper nor Turkish. It took two centuries to establish itself in Hungarian cookery. Before the nineteenth century, imported black pepper dominated the seasoning of sausages; the Continental Blockade (the economic embargo decreed by Napoleon from 1806 to cut off British trade with continental Europe), by interrupting pepper supplies, accelerated the generalisation of local paprika, already cultivated and consumed in Hungary since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Historians regard this shift as an accelerating factor rather than the origin of the present aromatic profile. This route links the Iberian zone directly to the book’s Eastern European zone. The geography of charcuterie preserves the trace: paprika prevails in Hungary and the Balkans, where the Ottoman occupation was long; it fades in favour of caraway and marjoram in Poland and Czechia, though it does not disappear altogether.

The third route is the most extensive. The Portuguese spread the chilli through Asia and Africa in their circumnavigations from the fifteenth century onwards. In East Africa, it became piri-piri, and in this form it structures the chouriço de Maputo, hotter and coarser than its Iberian ancestor. It continued on its way to Goa, where an encounter with Konkan palm vinegar gave rise to the Goan chouriço, now considered an Indian sausage. The Seville–Lisbon–Goa journey is one of the longest and best documented in the book.

The chilli is thus the only ingredient whose worldwide diffusion can be followed from a single point (Seville, 1493) in three directions. It travels and is transformed in travelling; the product it engenders on arrival reveals its origin only to those who know the route.

Sausages cross the Atlantic

The domestic pig was unknown in the Americas before Christopher Columbus introduced the first eight pigs on his second voyage in 1493. Its arrival created the conditions for the development of a charcuterie that had not existed before. The colonists brought with them animals, techniques, recipes and eating habits that would collide with very different ingredients and tastes.

The Mexican chorizo illustrates this confrontation. The ancho chilli replaced the pimentón, cane vinegar replaced red wine, and the texture changed, producing a filling that crumbles in cooking rather than a sausage that slices. Of the Sevillian model, only the name and the stuffing technique remain. This transformation took one to two generations, a timescale frequent in the cases of transplantation described in this book. The linguiça followed the caravels to Brazil, where it became the linguiça calabresa, today one of the most widely produced sausages in Latin America.

In the same period, the Portuguese alheira and farinheira illustrate a notable exception: these charcuterie products never travelled, their genesis being intrinsically bound to a local predicament. In 1497, King Manuel I forcibly converted the Jews of Portugal to Christianity. Watched by the Inquisition, the cristãos-novos made sausages that imitated the appearance of pork charcuterie but contained none: poultry and bread for the alheira, flour and vegetable fat for the farinheira. Conceived as proof of religious conformity, these preparations are today European PGIs. The farinheira is one of the rare vegetarian sausages in this book. Here, what is at work is not the spread of a sausage from one territory to another, but the invention of a sausage by constrained mimicry, under the pressure of an institution whose purpose was anything but culinary.

Colonisation and transplantations

Colonisation also introduced stuffing techniques into territories that did not know them. What travels here is no longer an ingredient but a complete body of know-how, transplanted into a different environment.

South Africa illustrates the process. The boerewors, ‘farmer’s sausage’ in Afrikaans, has its origin in the Dutch charcuterie traditions introduced by the colonists in the seventeenth century. Freshly ground coriander, the traditional and near-universal spice of boerewors, is the marker of this Dutch heritage. But the boerewors is no longer a Dutch sausage: the use of local game (springbok, kudu, oryx in the Karoo wors), the braai cooking method over embers of African hardwood, and the prohibition of added vegetable or dairy proteins have made it a South African product within a few generations.

Oceania is the zone where this process is most recent and most visible. The first British colonists who landed at Botany Bay in 1788 probably brought with them the eating habits of England: the sausage, as a breakfast ingredient, contains a high proportion of rusk. New Zealand adapted the technique to its dominant raw material, lamb, in a country with roughly six sheep per inhabitant. New Caledonia illustrates the same logic with the rusa deer, introduced in 1870 and progressively integrated into local charcuterie (sausages, dry sausages and merguez). The rest of the island Pacific did not develop a comparable charcuterie tradition: the indigenous cooking methods (earth oven, direct cooking, preservation in coconut milk) make stuffing culturally foreign there, and when sausages do circulate, they are industrial imports rather than a transmitted practice.

In South-East Asia, the European formats hybridised with older local traditions. The French presence in Indochina in the nineteenth century helped to fix the contemporary form of the Vietnamese chả lụa, a smooth-textured pork sausage wrapped in banana leaves and steamed, though the intensive pounding technique that produces this elastic paste is itself properly Vietnamese and older. The Spanish presence in the Philippines gave rise to the longanisas, whose present regional diversity (sweet in Cebu, heavily garlicked in Vigan) no longer resembles the Iberian model. In each case, the imported technique met pre-existing traditions, and it is the combination of the two that has produced today's preparations.

Standardisations and diasporas (nineteenth – twentieth century)

From the nineteenth century onwards, it was mass migration, war and state standardisation projects that took over from the trade routes. Circulations became faster, more dispersed and often unpredictable.

Migrations and their transformations

The European waves of immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries carried charcuterie traditions to every continent. Within a few decades, millions of people took with them recipes and techniques that would be transformed on contact with their host countries.

The case of the Acadians is one of the oldest of these transfers. From 1755, the Great Upheaval scattered the French-speaking people of Acadia towards the British colonies of the Atlantic coast, as well as to England and France. After a long stay in France, marked by the failure of an agricultural settlement in Poitou and then a decade of waiting in Nantes, the largest of their emigration waves brought nearly 1,600 of them to Louisiana in 1785. There, they would form the nucleus of the Cajun community, whose name is nothing but a deformation of Acadian. It is in this context that Louisiana andouille is often traced to the French andouille, even though the region’s charcuterie also owes much to the German contribution. Cajun andouille has, in any case, departed markedly from it: a smoked, spicy pork sausage. It has little in common with the offal andouille from which it inherited its name.

Louisiana concentrates, within a confined space, a density of charcuterie crossings hard to find anywhere else on the continent. The chaurice, whose name is a Frenchification of the Spanish chorizo, is the clearest example: arriving with the Spanish colonists during the period when Spain governed the colony, from 1769, it drifted away from its Iberian model by adapting to local ingredients and tastes, until it became a pork sausage spiced with chilli, most often fresh. New Orleans passed successively from France to Spain, then briefly back to France, before the sale to the United States in 1803, and each of these transitions marked its culinary history.

German immigrants introduced to the United States the Frankfurter würstchen, which industrial standardisation turned into one of the most widely consumed sausages in the world, in a form its inventors would not recognise: the hot dog. The Polish communities of the Midwest introduced the kiełbasa, a term that has entered everyday American vocabulary. The Calabrians introduced the linguiça calabresa to Brazil, and the Ukrainians brought the kovbasa to Canada. In each case, the mechanism is the same: a community carries its charcuterie with it, the charcuterie is transformed, and the resulting product is no longer the one that set out.

The most precisely dated transfer is also the most unexpected. In 1918, German prisoners of war interned at Narashino, in Japan, passed on their smoking techniques to an official of the national institute of animal industry. The addition of soy sauce, mirin and dashi produced a proper Japanese sausage. The charcuterie industry that grew from it today produces several hundred thousand tonnes a year, and awareness of its Germanic origin has almost entirely disappeared. Charcuterie know-how rarely takes the expected routes: trade, colonisation and migration are the usual vectors; a prisoner-of-war camp is a far rarer one.

In Australia, the first British colonists introduced a fresh charcuterie of English tradition, based on meat bound with rusk and seasoned with herbs such as sage. The grilled sausage, or snag, became its identity marker, inseparable from the barbecue. The kangaroo sausage illustrates a later stage of this local appropriation: the integration of indigenous products, wattleseed (acacia seed) and Tasmanian pepper, drawn from Aboriginal bush tucker (the whole range of indigenous Australian foods, animal and vegetable, traditionally eaten by the Aboriginal peoples), into a charcuterie format of European origin.

These transfers, diverse as they are, never entirely erase the origin. The name survives, and with it the trace of a place, a people or an era, precisely what the national legislations of the twentieth century would attempt to seize and to fix.

National standardisations

The twentieth century also produced an inverse movement: state attempts to standardise charcuterie traditions.

The Soviet doktorskaya kolbasa (literally ‘the doctor’s sausage’), created in 1936 at the Mikoyan factory in Moscow on the orders of Commissar Mikoyan, belongs to a logic opposed to that of peasant charcuterie. Conceived as a dietetic food for people weakened by the civil war, its recipe was codified in the GOST (the Soviet state standard), with strict proportions and no garlic or paprika, both considered irritating. A standardised product, reproducible in every factory in the USSR, it remains one of the best-selling sausages in Russia three decades after the Union's dissolution. In Central Asia, local traditions, from the Kazakh kazy to the Uzbek hasip (a traditional liver sausage based on mutton), were partly marginalised in favour of this centralised production, born of political will.

Western Europe followed a different path. The geographical protections (PGI, PDO, TSG), made possible by the European framework since 1992, formalise practices that had been transmitted orally. The Frankfurter würstchen may be produced only in the vicinity of Frankfurt; the Nürnberger rostbratwurst must measure between 7 and 9 cm and weigh between 20 and 25 g; the saucisse de Morteau is recognisable by its wooden peg. These codifications aim to protect an existing diversity, not to impose uniformity, but they fix in a legal text what had until then been a living body of knowledge.

In Asia, China today has the world's largest system of geographical indications, managed by three distinct bodies. Charcuterie holds an important place in it, from Cantonese lap cheong to Sichuan dried sausages. The Chinese charcuterie tradition is one of the oldest in the world, but its apparatus of legal protection is one of the most recent, postdating the European system by more than a decade. For centuries, these traditions were maintained by family transmission alone. That China judged it necessary to protect them from the 2000s onwards, using tools inspired by the European model, testifies to the pressure that rapid urbanisation exerts on oral traditions.

In Africa, South Africa's regulation on boerewors (a minimum of 90 per cent meat, a maximum of 30 per cent fat, a prohibition on added vegetable or dairy proteins, and coriander, traditional but not imposed by the text) is one of the few legal protections for a sausage.

These various cases illustrate a worldwide movement: the transformation of an oral tradition into a text. The codified traditions (Europe, China) are more visible than those that remain oral (sub-Saharan Africa, South-East Asia, Oceania). This imbalance reflects neither a lesser richness nor a lesser antiquity of the traditions concerned, but the limits of the accessible documentation.

Contemporary flows and returns (late twentieth – twenty-first century)

The flows have become multidirectional. The zones that once received now transmit. Products transplanted one, two or several centuries ago are beginning to return, transformed, to their territories of origin. And local industries, born at the end of the colonial era, in turn import Western names for products that no emigrant community ever carried.

The returns

The Brazilian linguiça, transformed over two centuries, is reimported into Luso-Brazilian grocers’ shops in Europe. Mexican chorizo is available in the grocery stores of Madrid. The product returns to its point of departure, but is no longer the same. Mexican chorizo in Madrid is not a Spanish chorizo: it is an American product, built on a Spanish heritage and transformed by four centuries of evolution. Circulation has produced diversity, not convergence.

The merguez is the most massive return recorded in this book. Carried by North African immigration since the 1960s, it is produced industrially in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and consumed in France in volumes comparable to those of some regional sausages.

The Calabrian nduja, unknown outside Italy before 2010, appears on restaurant menus in London and Edinburgh.

The ćevapčići, carried by the Yugoslav diaspora, are produced industrially in Germany and Austria for markets that extend beyond the communities of origin.

In each of these cases, the product that returns is no longer the one that left.

The contemporary diasporas

The Middle Eastern and African communities settled in Scandinavia have introduced lamb sausages and spiced preparations into Nordic supermarkets. Scandinavia, which had received its charcuterie influences through the Hanseatic network or along trade routes reaching back to Constantinople, now receives contributions from diasporas in the Maghreb, the Levant and the Horn of Africa. The mechanism has changed; the direction of the flow has not.

Other examples are attested: Goan chouriço is available in grocers in London, Dubai and Toronto; the seekh kebab is present in South Asian restaurants in every large Western city. The mechanism is always the same: a diaspora carries its recipes with it, adapts them, and gradually makes them accessible beyond its own community in a world now globalised.

The industrial counter-flows

An industrial movement carries standardised sausages of the Frankfurter type in parallel to markets across the world. A European format, simplified and adapted to local constraints (halal, low-cost, mass distribution), penetrates markets where the stuffing tradition is weak or absent.

In Turkey, Iran and the Gulf states, chicken or beef sausages, made locally to meet halal requirements, have conquered mass retail since the 1990s. In these zones, industrial products coexist with old traditions such as Turkish sucuk or Iranian sosis bandari.

In most African countries, the stuffing tradition is weak or absent, except in South Africa, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Nigeria has more recently, from the 2000s, developed a cased sausage derived from the traditional suya (see entry). Industrial sausages of the knack or bangers type, made with chicken or cheap mixtures, have spread massively there since the 1980s and 1990s. For many urban consumers in Nairobi or Lagos, the industrial chicken sausage is the first, and sometimes the only, reference for what a sausage is.

The Kenyan case is likewise instructive. The smokies and the safari sausages have been integrated into Kenyan cooking on the same footing as the chapati and the samosa, products of Indian origin brought by the communities the British imported to build the Uganda Railway at the end of the nineteenth century. The Kenyan chapati is no longer Indian, the Kenyan samosa is no longer Indian, and the safari sausage is no longer European. They have become Kenyan through the same process of appropriation as Mexican chorizo or Cajun andouille, but starting with an industrial rather than an artisanal product. Globalisation not only produces uniformity; it also produces appropriation, and this appropriation works regardless of the quality of the starting product.

The contrast with South Africa remains sharp. The boerewors, protected by law since 1990, stands at the opposite end of the quality spectrum from the safari sausage, but belongs to a logic yet another from the one about to be described.

The post-colonial industries

A mechanism close to but distinct from the preceding one characterises the national charcuterie industries that emerged in formerly colonised countries at the end of the Second World War. Where the industrial counter-flows described above designate the imposition, from outside, of standardised sausages on markets where the stuffing tradition was weak, here it is local industries that take the initiative and import not recipes or techniques but names drawn from the European or North American charcuterie repertoire. No significant diaspora carried these products; they are made on the spot by national companies for the national market, adapted to local religious and dietary constraints.

The Sri Lankan case gives the clearest illustration. The brand Elephant House, the charcuterie branch of the Ceylon Cold Stores group, founded in Colombo in 1866 by the German engineer Arthur von Possner, launched its sausage range in 1966 and today markets a German Chicken Bratwurst, a Black Forest Sausage, a Cumberland Sausage and a Pork Paprika Mortadella. No significant German or British diaspora ever existed in Ceylon; the names were imported directly by the industry, and pork gave way to chicken to respect the country's majority religious sensibilities. The same mechanism is found in Mexico with FUD (an English-language acronym for Fine, Unique, and Delicious), whose range includes FUD York Ham and FUD Virginia Ham. So too in the Philippines, with the Tender Juicy Hotdog made by Purefoods (since 1956), an ‘artificial’ red sausage that has become an identity marker to the point that Filipinos in the diaspora seek it out at grocers in Los Angeles.

The loop closes in the 2010s and 2020s. These brands now export to the places where the diasporas from their countries of origin have settled: Tender Juicy has been sold in Singapore since 2015 and in the United States; Elephant House opened production in Australia in 2024 for the local Sri Lankan community; FUD is distributed today in Spain, France, Germany and Italy.

Inverted circulation par excellence: a post-colonial industry replays, for the descendants of emigrants, products whose names had themselves been imported a century earlier.

The tensions between craft and standardisation

The Polish kiełbasa and the Ukrainian kovbasa are available today in artisanal and industrial forms whose compositions differ appreciably. The difference between an industrial product and an artisanal one is often perceptible from the first bite.

Since 1991, a movement to rehabilitate local traditions has taken hold in Central Asia. The Kazakh kazy, marginalised during the Soviet period in favour of the doktorskaya, is now present in the grocers’ shops of the German, Russian and Turkish diasporas. To recover the kazy is to recover a communal practice bound to Nauryz (the new year and spring festival of Kazakhstan) and to the great feasts, a meaning that the doktorskaya, by its very construction, could not carry.

Other examples exist: the sobrassada of Majorca, long confined to its archipelago, has begun to circulate outside Spain since the 2010s, carried by gastronomic interest in spreadable charcuterie; the spices of Australian bush tucker (wattleseed and Tasmanian pepper) are beginning to circulate in international kitchens ahead of the sausages that contain them. That ingredients precede preparations in their diffusion is a phenomenon characteristic of the youngest charcuterie zones.

The constant

One constant runs through all these centuries of circulation: the speed of transformation. One to two generations are enough for an imported product to be regarded as local. The technique remains identifiable for a generation, recognisable for two, then merges into the culinary landscape of its host territory to the point of becoming invisible. The Australian snag is no longer British. The Argentine chorizo criollo is no longer Spanish. The Kenyan safari sausage is no longer a knack.

This mechanism works regardless of the quality of the starting product. Artisanal transplantations and industrial penetrations obey the same process of local appropriation. It works even when nothing was physically transplanted, as in the case of the post-colonial industries that borrow names from a repertoire no community ever brought home: the Sri Lankan German Chicken Bratwurst was never German; it was born Sri Lankan under a foreign name, and it is under that name that it now travels to the diaspora of Melbourne. Globalisation is no exception: it accelerates and democratises what earlier centuries had established, and adds this variant in which the name circulates without its object.

***

Sausages do not become uniform as they travel. They multiply. The charcuterie world is more diverse in the twenty-first century than it was in the third century BC. The isolated hearths of the beginnings have become the nodes of a network in which everything circulates in every direction, including, now, names alone. Where the preceding chapter identified independent convergences (sausages that resemble one another without descending from one another), this chapter has documented transformative diffusions (related sausages that no longer resemble one another). The two mechanisms operate in parallel; together, they explain the world’s charcuterie diversity.

The matter

To understand what the sausage means, one must first look at what goes into it. Into it go the pieces that the rest of the kitchen sets aside: the blood, the offal, the trimmings and the intestines (usually a casing). Unlike a fine cut of meat, a roast, for instance, the sausage hides its contents inside an envelope, withdrawing them from view. It gathers what is generally discarded and renders it unrecognisable.

At the origin lies an economic logic. When the pig is raised and killed on the farm, nothing is thrown away, and the chapter ‘Parallelisms’ showed that this rule produces the same solutions everywhere. Blood is the clearest case: there is a great deal of it, once a year at slaughter time, and it spoils within a few hours. It must therefore be dealt with quickly. That is why blood sausage is one of the oldest known preparations, as we saw above in Homer and Petronius. Yet this same blood has at times been forbidden: at the beginning of the tenth century, the Byzantine emperor Leo VI proscribed its consumption, in the name of the old religious prohibition on blood. The very matter that blood sausage celebrates has thus, at times, been judged impure, to the point of being banned by law.

Two facts extend this idea. The first comes from Rome. There, the animal was cut up according to a social order: the fine cuts for the powerful and the clergy, and the ‘fifth quarter’, that is, the offal, for the workers of the slaughterhouses of Testaccio (the eighth hill of Rome, a working-class and industrial district). These workers were often paid with what nobody wanted: blood, tripe, brains, intestines. Their families made a cuisine of it, and that refuse is today a pride of the Roman table.

The second fact concerns danger. This matter is so fragile that, badly preserved, it can kill, and this has left a trace in the language. The word ‘botulism’ comes from the Latin botulus, meaning ‘sausage’: the disease was named after the spoiled sausages that caused it. It was a German physician, Justinus Kerner, who first described it at the beginning of the nineteenth century, based on cases linked to smoked sausages and blood puddings. The sausage is thus at once food and poison, which says much about what it contains.

The sausage also puts back at the centre of the plate what Julia Kristeva called the abject: the blood and viscera that are usually kept out of sight so as not to be confronted with death and defilement. It does not avoid them; sealed inside a casing, it conceals them from the eye and even renders them appetising.

The rest of this chapter builds on this starting point. Before being a symbol, the sausage is an assembly of what is least appealing in the animal.

The frontier: religious prohibitions

This matter soon meets a fundamental limit, that of religious prohibition. Where the consumption of pork is forbidden, the products derived from it, such as pork sausage, are excluded from eating practices, which helps to trace genuine cultural and spatial frontiers, as this book describes. The prohibition should not, however, be read as a driver of dietary diversification: it defines above all what is excluded, without thereby bringing substitute products into being.

Beyond the ‘pork frontier’ lie entire regions where other meats dominate. The lamb merguez, the beef sujuk and the horse kazy are traditions in their own right, born in cuisines that never knew the pig. There was therefore nothing to replace. To treat them as substitute products would be to treat the pork sausage as the original model, which the chapters ‘Independent hearths’ and ‘Parallelisms’ have precisely ruled out. The frontier of prohibition, by contrast, confirms these separate hearths.

A few exceptions, nevertheless, shed light on the phenomenon. Bali is the only majority-Hindu island within Indonesia whose population is nearly 90 per cent Muslim. Because pork was not prohibited there, the urutan, a pork sausage flavoured with galangal and turmeric, survived. Isolated at the heart of an archipelago where its consumption is largely absent, it represents a singular case. Its endurance owes precisely to the cultural and religious frontier that surrounds it, which makes it, in a sense, a genuine gastronomic enclave.

There is, nonetheless, another, rarer case in which the prohibition forces a product to be transformed: when a sausage plainly made of pork is remade without it. This is the Portuguese alheira, already mentioned. After the forced conversion of the Jews of Portugal, certain families continued in secret to avoid pork, which the Inquisition watched for at table; they therefore made a sausage of bread and poultry that imitated a pork charcuterie, hung in plain sight to keep up appearances. Migration produces the same effect: the kosher hot dog or Frankfurter remakes in beef a product that originally contained pork, and the more recent Sri Lankan bratwurst is made with chicken. In these cases, and only these, there is a pork original that the rule or exile obliges one to change. Prohibition, then, draws lines and creates a new product only in those rare places where it meets a pork sausage that already existed.

The journey of meaning

The preceding chapter followed the product: how it changes as it travels, to the point where its name alone sometimes recalls its origin. It remains to be seen what it becomes for those who carry it. In migrating, the sausage is no longer an ordinary food: it becomes a landmark, a taste that recalls the homeland.

Authenticity is then reconstructed far from its origin. In the United States, the Feast of San Gennaro's sausages with peppers have become a symbol of American Italianness. The distinction between sweet and hot sausage, unknown in Italy, serves as a tradition there. In the Philippines, longganisa is a source of regional pride: people can tell a Vigan one from a Cebu one, grow attached to it, and seek it out at grocers in the diaspora. Even though the product has moved away from its Spanish model, the attachment has only strengthened.

This attachment can even carry memory. One sees it with the kazy: to recover and promote it after the Soviet period is to recover Nauryz and a sense of belonging that the doktorskaya could not replace. What is recovered is not only a recipe but also the era it represents.

The New Caledonian merguez is another example. Introduced by Maghrebi families who came to work in the nickel mines from the 1960s onwards, it has become the barbecue sausage of the whole territory, including among the Kanak. Its principal change, rusa deer in place of lamb, is simply a matter of the local game. What travelled was not a recipe but an attachment, which became common to people who did not share it at the start. The recipe changes and sometimes forgets its origin; the name and the taste go on telling it.

The work of all

Behind the sausage, there is almost always a group and a season. The chapter ‘Parallelisms’ showed this for the winter pig slaughter, the same event that changes its name from one country to the next, from the tue-cochon to the Schlachtfest. It is not merely a matter of preservation: it is a social moment, and the sausage is often its most meaning-laden product.

The Kazakh kazy is another example that illustrates it well. The horse is slaughtered at the beginning of winter, among family and neighbours, and the sausage drawn from it does not accompany the feast: it is an integral part of it, from Nauryz to weddings, as its entry details. The same link is found elsewhere: the Tibetan gyurma follows the nomads' cycle, while the Balinese urutan is prepared for the festivals of Galungan and Kuningan.

This collective work is not the same for everyone, but it must be described with caution. Where farm slaughter in Europe is documented, the tasks are divided: to the men, most often, the killing and the heavy butchering; to the women, what follows, the blood beaten at once, the offal to be cleaned, the filling and the stuffing. The anthropology of the division of labour between men and women, notably in Alain Testart, explains this distribution by an old logic that keeps women away from the moment when blood is shed, rather than from its transformation. The inventory of France’s intangible heritage, which has recorded the tue-cochon, describes the same chain: butchering is learnt among men, and the recipes pass from mother to daughter. The sausage, which comes at the end, thus often falls to the women, without their being the guardians of a reserved knowledge: each has a post in a labour that mobilises the whole household and the neighbourhood.

This moment should not be idealised: the image of the convivial feast is in part a recent rereading, set against industrial slaughter. What matters is not who does what, but that it is done together, at a fixed date, and that the gesture is passed on by taking part.

From refusal to pride

A society often looks at its sausage from several angles. The first concerns pride. This product of the poor, made from leftovers, has sometimes climbed the ladder to achieve protected designation. The pages of this book devoted to geographical protections tell of the ascent. The fifth quarter mentioned above, once given in wages to slaughterhouse workers, has moved onto the menus of fine tables.

The state has taken a hand as well. We saw above how the Soviet doktorskaya, created by decree and fixed by a state standard, made of a sausage, an official food. The humblest matter can thus end up codified and supervised.

Closer to our own time, haute cuisine has taken up the poor man’s offal as a virtue. The London chef Fergus Henderson, in his Nose to Tail Eating (1999), made the use of the whole beast, offal included, an avowed principle: it would be dishonest, he says, not to make the most of the entire animal. The offal of Testaccio thus finds its way onto starred tables. What was impure at the start of this chapter can therefore become both a regulated product and a sought-after dish.

Laughter

And yet the same sausage that rises to a protected designation is also the one people laugh at. It has long been a comic figure, and this is no small detail: it is found in literature as in everyday speech.

First, there is a parody. In The Knights, already mentioned, Aristophanes makes a sausage-seller the portrait of the demagogue, presupposing that the audience had already laughed at the character. Rabelais, in the Quart Livre, recounts the war of the Andouilles: on the Wild Island, the Andouilles, at war with Carêmeprenant, take Pantagruel for an envoy of Lent; battle breaks out when a large cervelas is sliced in two, and Frère Jean has his cooks burst out of an enormous sow, a parody of the Trojan horse. The comedy comes from the incongruity: a soft, ordinary object treated as a war hero.

This laughter has an older foundation that raises the question of prohibition. The sausage stands for fatty meat, opposed to the lean fish of the fast, in a battle of Carnival against Lent, whose trace is found in a thirteenth-century French poem, La Bataille de Caresme et de Charnage (one of the oldest texts of French gastronomic literature). Bruegel painted it: in The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, Carnival, astride a barrel, brandishes a spit laden with a pig’s head, poultry, and sausages like a lance, while Lent, a gaunt figure, opposes him with a baker’s peel bearing two herrings. This is the world of laughter and the body that Mikhail Bakhtin studied under the name of carnival: the sausage there becomes the emblem of the flesh confronting abstinence.

From there, the comic slides easily into bawdy allusion, where the sausage serves as a ready-made phallic object. George Orwell, in a 1941 essay on the comic postcards of English seaside resorts, saw in this broad humour a tolerated revolt against good manners, a safety valve rather than a true subversion. The trace of it persists to this day: the Austrian artist Conchita Wurst plays on her stage name, knowing that wurst, in German slang, designates the male member. Conchita, for its part, is a Spanish forename, a diminutive of Concepción or of Concha; Concha means ‘shell’, but across much of Latin American Spanish it is a vulgar term for the female sex.

The same laughter finally passes into everyday language. German is full of examples: das ist mir Wurst means ‘I couldn’t care less’, eine Extrawurst designates special treatment, es geht um die Wurst a decisive moment, armes Würstchen a poor devil. Politics has its word to say as well: ‘Laws are like sausages: the less you know about how they are made, the more you respect them.’ The remark is usually attributed to Bismarck; in reality, it comes from the American poet and satirist John Godfrey Saxe, in 1869, and was only lent to Bismarck in the 1930s.

In many American cartoons, the sausage can even become the central theme: Sausage Party (a cult animated film in which the foods of a supermarket come to life, with Frank, a sausage, the main hero, seeking to escape his destiny); Apple & Onion (in this Cartoon Network universe, the anthropomorphic characters include sausages that are often objects of desire). The French television series Casimir is yet another example, with its signature dish, the gloubi-boulga (based on saucisse de Toulouse). Finally, in the comic album Asterix and the Banquet (1963), Dogmatix makes his first appearance outside a charcuterie in Lutetia, which he leaves to follow Asterix and Obelix, and the journey brings back to the village saucisses de Toulouse and saucisson de Lyon. Examples of this kind abound.

The sausage makes people laugh because it is humble, soft, without noble form and made of what one prefers not to name. Aristophanes’ demagogue, Rabelais’s flesh of Carnival, Saxe’s remark about what is better not watched all come from the same place as the beginning of this chapter. What makes the sausage impure is also what makes it funny.

***

The sausage was born of a constraint that every herding society has known. It travelled along the routes and migrations, carrying a meaning that comes undone and reforms along the way. So simple a thing, made of pieces set aside, ends up saying a great deal about those who make it and those who eat it.

The division into eleven zones

This book is organised around eleven zones whose boundaries do not coincide with the usual geographical or political divisions. Charcuterie traditions do not respect contemporary borders. They follow trade routes, vanished empires, population migrations and centuries of culinary exchange. In every case, this book has chosen cultural territory over geographical territory.

A few decisions deserve to be made explicit.

Turkey appears in the Mediterranean zone rather than the Central Asian zone, even though Turkish sucuk shares a common origin with the sausages of the Turkic peoples of the steppes: the coherence of the Mediterranean charcuterie civilisation (lamb and beef, warm spices, vinegar and citrus) outweighs linguistic kinship here. Greece and Cyprus appear there for the same reason: the Greek loukaniko and the Cypriot sheftalia belong, by their technique and their seasoning, more to the cooking of the eastern Mediterranean than to the Latin or Germanic arc.

The islands of the Indian Ocean are grouped with the Indian subcontinent not by geographical proximity but by the trade routes that have linked them to Kerala, Goa and Gujarat for centuries, as part of the continuity of the circumnavigation of Africa.

The Americas form a single chapter, from Canada to Patagonia, because the logic that binds them is the transformation of colonial heritages in contact with local ingredients and pre-existing traditions.

The eleven zones are as follows.

Western Europe brings together France, Italy, the Germanic world and the British Isles around a shared Roman heritage and an old tradition of charcuterie codification.

The Iberian Peninsula forms a distinct chapter on account of the pivotal role it played in spreading the American chilli towards Europe, Africa and Asia, and of the traces left by eight centuries of Arab presence.

Northern Europe and Scandinavia are united by birch-wood smoking, potato starch and a spiced, often sweet touch inherited from the medieval routes.

Eastern and Central Europe is structured by two imperial heritages, the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the north and the Ottoman Empire in the south, and by a shared culture of collective winter slaughter.

The Mediterranean world, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf constitute a coherent charcuterie continuum, founded on lamb and beef, warm spices and the Islamic dietary constraint, from Marrakesh to the Persian Gulf.

Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Turkic world bring together the nomadic traditions of the steppes and the Caucasian traditions of Armenia and Georgia, all of which are traversed by the Silk Road.

Sub-Saharan Africa is treated with the modesty that the lack of documentation demands: the few recipes retained illustrate the diversity of the paths by which charcuterie has taken shape on the continent.

The Americas form a territory of superpositions and transformations: the pig, unknown before 1493, European stuffing techniques, pre-Hispanic spices and deported African traditions met here.

East and South-East Asia documents an old and independent charcuterie tradition, founded on aromatic raw materials of its own: lemongrass, galangal, fish sauce, soy sauce.

The Indian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean bring together the charcuterie traditions of India’s minority communities and the islands that the spice routes have linked to the subcontinent for centuries.

Oceania is the youngest zone: peopled by successive waves of Austronesian navigators and later by European colonisation, it produces sausages whose influences are still visible.

This division is neither perfect nor definitive. Some sausages could have appeared elsewhere, and several borderline cases are flagged in the introductions to the zones concerned.