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

Among the eleven zones of this book, Western Europe stands apart for the degree of codification of its charcuterie. The Frankfurter würstchen may legally be produced only in the vicinity of Frankfurt; the Thüringer rostbratwurst must, under its product specification, measure between 15 and 20 cm and contain at least 51 per cent raw materials originating in Thuringia; the saucisse de Morteau is recognisable by its regulated wooden peg. These specifications, more or less formalised, extend a tradition born in the Middle Ages: a statute of the Nuremberg town council, in 1313, already imposed the exclusive use of pork loin for the ancestor of the Nürnberger and entrusted its control to sworn butchers, who threw non-conforming pieces into the Pegnitz. The recent geographical protections (PGI, PDO, TSG) are more numerous here than anywhere else in the book, less because of the superiority of the products than through the effect of an old guild organisation and of a European legal framework which, since 1992, has supplied the tools to formalise usages until then transmitted orally.

The dominant seasoning varies little from one tradition to the next: black or white pepper, nutmeg, mace, caraway and marjoram form the aromatic constant of the sausages of Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Yet this base has not always prevailed. The medieval trade routes that supplied Venice, Genoa and the fairs of Champagne with Eastern spices left a lasting imprint on certain southern charcuteries, such as the cinnamon, clove and nutmeg of the Catalan butifarras, or the wild fennel of the Tuscan salsicce. The arrival of the American chilli in the sixteenth century, via the Iberian Peninsula, altered profiles selectively: pimentón took hold in Spain and reached Portuguese charcuterie, while Germanic Europe and the British Isles remained largely impervious to it. The divide between the cuisines that adopted the chilli and those that ignored it still runs across the zone today.

Smoking follows a geography that roughly overlaps the old Germanic territories: systematic in Alsace, Franche-Comté, Westphalia, Lower Saxony and the Swiss cantons, it remains absent or marginal in the French and Italian Mediterranean traditions. Beech dominates, with a few exceptions: softwood (spruce or fir) for the Morteau, cherry for certain artisanal German productions. These techniques have sometimes travelled far, as far as Japan, where German-style charcuterie goes back to German charcutiers taken prisoner in 1914, as the East Asia section details.

The migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries exported these techniques to every continent. The Acadians, deported from Nova Scotia in 1755 and then scattered through the British colonies, England and France, reached Louisiana in waves between 1764 and 1785 and transplanted the French andouille there, which became the Cajun andouille smoked over pecan wood. Calabrian immigrants introduced the linguiça calabresa to Brazil, today one of the most widely produced sausages in Latin America. German immigrants founded bratwurst traditions in the United States and Australia, which then evolved independently. In each case, the original product remained recognisable for a generation or two before transforming on contact with local ingredients, climate and host tastes. This book documents these European migrations more abundantly than the others, Chinese, Ottoman or African, because the written sources and the regulatory documentation are richer there; this imbalance is an acknowledged limit of the book.

The British Isles stand apart from the continental tradition. The incorporation of rusk at 10 to 15 per cent in pork sausages, the oat groats of the black pudding, or the moulded, casing-less form of the lorne sausage (which, lacking a casing, falls outside the scope of this book) belong to a context in which the sausage is an element of the full breakfast rather than a preparation in its own right. The influence of the Empire spread as far as Australia, New Zealand and English-speaking Canada. The flows have since reversed or crossed: the merguez is produced and consumed in France in volumes comparable to those of some regional sausages, the nduja appears on London menus, the chorizo mexicano is made in the large cities of Europe.