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

Beneath these strata, a common peasant foundation has run through every era and every domination. The collective winter pig slaughter is its most visible expression. Each language has its word for the same event: zabijačka in Czech, disznóvágás in Hungarian, svinjokolj in Serbian, świniobicie in Polish. A winter’s day on which family and neighbours gather to transform a whole pig into a set of preparations meant to last several months. It is in this context that the Polish kaszanka, the Hungarian hurka, the Czech jitrnice, and the Balkan krvavica are born: cereal blood puddings that use perishable blood and offal in the hours that follow slaughter. This ritual predates the empires and has outlived them.

Paprika links this zone to the Iberian Peninsula. Arrived from Spain in the Balkans through the Ottoman expansion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it entered Budapest under the name of törökbors (Turkish pepper), and it took two centuries to establish itself in the kitchens of Hungary and the Balkans before becoming the central spice of the kolbász, the Csabai and the Gyulai. In Poland and Czechia, paprika remained marginal: the dominant seasonings there are caraway, marjoram, and garlic, a trio inherited from the Central European charcuterie tradition rather than from the Ottoman routes. This dividing line between the paprika and caraway cuisines runs throughout the whole section.

Russia and Ukraine add the Soviet system to this accumulation. The doktorskaya kolbasa, a cooked sausage created in 1936 at the Mikoyan factory in Moscow on the orders of the commissar for the food industry, is a standardised product, designed to be reproducible identically in every factory in the USSR, without regional identity. It remains one of the best-selling sausages in Russia, three decades after the dissolution of the Union. The Ukrainian kovbasa, of pork shoulder smoked over fruit wood, belongs to the opposite tradition: artisanal, regional, bound to the cycle of the Orthodox festivals, and carried abroad by the Ukrainian communities of Edmonton, Winnipeg and Chicago since the nineteenth century. The contrast between these two products illustrates the tension between industrial standardisation and local transmission that has characterised the whole zone since the twentieth century.

Poland occupies a place apart in this ensemble. The word kiełbasa designates not one particular sausage, but any sausage in Polish. The term entered everyday American vocabulary (kielbasa) with the Polish immigration waves of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries towards Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Buffalo, where artisanal butchers still keep family recipes alive. Here too, under the communist regime, standardisation documents that fixed every recipe, every gramme and every technique sought to make uniform what centuries of oral transmission had built, with lasting effects on artisanal diversity.

Since 1989, Western industrial production techniques have penetrated Eastern European markets, standardising products that local artisanal production struggled to compete on volume and cost. The tension between this standardisation and the maintenance of local traditions recurs in several entries of this section.