Consuming Interest
Back to the Old Banger !
By LESLIE ADRIAN IKE many other humble things, sausages are la now big business. The small makers, with their individual recipes and flavourings, have been replaced by firms like T. Wall and Sons Ltd., who use 10,000 pigs a week in their Willesden plant and cater for a country-wide market. These big manufacturers can show quite clearly that nutri- tionally the postwar product, with its higher meat content, is greatly superior to that of 1939. But the public remains dissatisfied; and the Government has been trying to find some way to soothe its discontent. Its first aim is to lay down minimum standards : but it is taking a long time to arrive at them. Questioned in the House of Commons last month,, the Minister of Agricul- ture and Food, Mr. Heathcoat-Amory, confessed that his experts have encountered 'unexpected technical difficulties.
To discover what these strange difficulties might be, I have been talking to men in the trade. Their views are depressing and do not, alas, bring us much nearer the succulent, meaty `banger' of Billy Bunter's dreams. What is hold- ing up the Government experts, apparently, is not the task of producing a standard which will give us wholesome, appetising sausages, but in evolving one that public-health,, analysts will be able to check efficiently.
Personally, I am not at all interested if the sausages I buy are standardised to the last grain of pepper or gram of cereal. All I do want to know is that they have a guaranteed minimum meat content; that I am not paying largely for padding. Sausages are a meat, not a vegetarian, dish; and this should be the primary considera- tion.
I agree that a meat standard does not guaran- tee a quality standard; inferior meat and too much fat could still be used. But the big manu- facturers, represented by the Sausage Manufac- turers' Association, insist that such a standard would at least improve the quality of the present- day product. They do not approve of the Amory standard sausage because, as a spokesman of the association told me, 'The law could not be en- forced. How can one possibly differentiate when, say, two grades of meat have been minced finely together in a sausage?'
But a high meat content would not, automati- cally, give us a savoury sausage. What is missing, I find, is the distinctive herb flavourings of the pre- war sausage. These varied in different parts of the country. The South preferred a spicy, peppery sausage; the North liked them with a softer, sage flavour. Today the mass-produced sausage must please everyone. The endtproduct—and here readers agree with me—is a tasteless compromise.
Another change in the postwar sausage is its texture. This began when wartime meat shortages meant that large quantities of cereal were used as sausage fillings. The result was a sausage so finely mixed and machined that its consistency earned it the nickname 'the toothpaste sausage.'
Familiarity breeds acceptance. Today, the manufacturers claim that the public prefer 'tooth- paste sausages' and have largely given up the old habit of adding small quantities of coarse bull beef to give even prime pork sausages a rough, nutty texture. The modern sausage has shed most of its cereal, but the high-quality meat now used is still ground almost to a paste.
Happily, those of us who still believe the pre- war product was better can be proved right at Harrods. They have just begun to market a luxury sausage. It costs 7s. a pound and is made from prime leg of pork. Egg only is used for binding. The flavouring, I am told, is secret, but the result is superb and nostb.lgic. Harrods tell me the de- mand is 'quite surprising.' It appears, to adapt Mr. Louis Armstrong, that with sausages 'It ain't what you do, it's the way how you do it. That's what gets results.'
I am glad to see that, at last, strong competi- tion has begun in the anti-freeze market.
Previously, `Bluecol' had 80 per cent. of the market. It sells at 15s. 6d. a quart and the makers recommend a one-in-three solution which pro- tects a radiator from forty-seven degrees of frost!
This year, Boots have entered the field and are selling an anti-freeze mixture at 10s. 6d. a quart. They recommend a one-in-four dilution which gives protection against twenty-five degrees of frost. They consider this adequate for even the severest British winter.
I wonder if readers are finding the new silicone polishes as good as we were led to suppose? I had tried a silicone shoe polish and found that after going out in the rain my black shoes appeared to be covered with a milky glue. Now my cleaner has asked me to go 'back to the old Min cream' for the dining-room table. 'This new stuff leaves a blue haze,' she claims.
Strangely, it is the silicone car polish, which has been condemned in some quarters,. that I find most efficient; and a friend who has used it in America for the past four years says she has done so with no ill effects.
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