Breakfast Sausage

This breakfast sausage is an inheritance of the British breakfast sausage, introduced by the English settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The British sausage, already seasoned with sage, pepper and nutmeg, evolved in the New England colonies towards a peppier product, more strongly flavoured with the American sage (Salvia officinalis), abundant in colonial gardens, and became a signature spice.

The presence of brown sugar is a particularity of the American charcuterie tradition and is absent from the European one. In the Southern states, sugar traditionally entered the seasoning of salt pork, a practice attested to since the eighteenth century. The maple-syrup variant, popular in New England and Vermont, reinforces this sweet-savoury dimension.

The breakfast sausage comes in two formats. The patty, a flattened, pan-fried disc, is the format used by fast-food outlets and diners, popularised by McDonald’s in 1972 with the McMuffin. The form, stuffed into a fine casing called a link, is the domestic form served with scrambled eggs. It is thus served either as a patty or as small links, alongside eggs, pancakes, and hash browns (crisp cakes made from grated potato). The Jimmy Dean brand, founded in 1969 by the Texan country singer of the same name, played a decisive part in the standardisation by marketing its sausage in a roll, a single format that the consumer shapes into patties. Today, the brand remains one of the leaders in fresh charcuterie sales in the United States.

In the Southern states, the breakfast sausage is at the heart of biscuits and gravy: biscuits (soft buttery rolls) topped with a white sauce thickened with crumbled sausage, a rustic dish of the Appalachians whose roots go back to the plantation kitchens of the eighteenth century.