How It's Made

One of our subscribers, Matt D., remarked to me that yesterday’s Trying! was depressing. He was not wrong. Many of these essays are depressing—that’s why they’re so fun! But to make it up to him, and to you all, I figured today I’d take on a lighter topic, one suggested by my own wife. Will it be depressing? Can I make it depressing? Let’s find out!

One of the first foods I learned to cook that required actual technique was the sausage. I must have been a teenager at the time, so the sausages were some kind of soft, fresh, Italianate sausages my mother bought at the local Food Lion in Williamsburg, Virginia. And she, too, was the one who most likely taught me this technique:

Using a fork, poke a bunch of small holes in the skin of two or three sausages. Put them in a shallow sauté pan (we had this one roundish pan that was ideal), along with a quarter or half a cup of water. Set them over medium heat, and cover the pan with a loosely fitting lid. As the water boils, it will cook the sausages, but it will also slowly escape as steam from beneath the lid, until eventually nothing is left and the sausages start to sear. When they’ve seared enough, which you can decide by the sound and smell emanating from the pan, you’re done! Plate ‘em, break out the good mustard, and you’re all set.

I loved—and still love—the elegance of this technique: cooking off the water slowly until you find yourself frying. It’s how you make gyoza. It’s how you make carnitas (which I did yesterday; email me for the secret ingredient). It’s an exercise in precise calculation and deep laziness—set it and forget it, at least until an upswing in the frequency of the bubbling or the sudden airborne presence of certain aromatic hydrocarbons awakens your forebrain. This is how the sausage gets made.

Sausage is the Rodney Dangerfield of meats. It is, by definition, an afterthought. You’ve butchered out all the solid, fancy cuts, and the table is littered with shards, nuggets, scraps—stray musculature, fat caps, connective tissue—so into the sausage they go!, along with salt (the sal that dominates their etymology) and whatever seeds and spices feel appropriate. Sausage is leftovers dressed up as a main, leftovers designed to last weeks or months, leftovers you don’t realize, but also kinda realize, are leftovers. This is why vegans should allow themselves to eat sausage—no animal is killed expressly for sausage¹.

But: Steak or sausage? I choose steak. Spareribs or sausage? I choose ribs. Sausage is almost never my first choice (or, admit it, yours), even though I really, truly do love sausage. That’s just not what sausage is.

More after the break…

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Sausages I have known and loved (stop snickering):

• The Isaan sausages I get from Bangkok Grocery and cook on the grill: light, intensely and almost medicinally herbal, with an intense but not overwhelming spiciness.

• The merguez from Paisanos: You order this skinny, reddish lamb sausage by the coil, and if you’re not grilling it, you just sear it off, cook onions, garlic, and tomatoes in the rendered fat, and finish it with good olive oil, lemon juice, parsley, and harissa. You brought a couple of baguettes, right?

• When I was in my early 20s, I once bragged to an older friend—a guy who owned some serious goddamn restaurants—about a sausage soup I used to make, which was probably nothing more than sautéed chunks of sausage, chicken broth, and a big ol’ glug of heavy cream. What the hell did I know? I haven’t made that monstrosity in almost 30 years, but I can still remember the deep satisfaction it brought, that Wall of Sound amplitude firing across my palate. So cringe, so good.

• The simple wood-fired sausage at Franny’s, served with no (or almost no) accoutrements. Paradise.

• Tiny shelf-stable chorizos I brought on a Washington state camping trip and cooked over an open fire.

• Loose chorizo I cooked down with canned chipotles in adobo and crushed tomatoes. Jean and I used to eat this all the time, yet I can’t remember with what: tortillas? bread? pasta? But the intensity of that sauce—its heft—stays with me.

I can call up still more—the liver sausage at Sun Ming Jan in Chinatown, the spreadable morcilla in Patagonia—and still: I never really think about sausage. It doesn’t figure, it doesn’t take precedence. I almost never opt for sausage, especially when there are other, meatier options. Sausage is an adjunct, as talented as its tenured brethren, but lower status, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Or can we? Can we change this, we who do in our souls ❤️ sausage? Can we flip that switch in our brains to prefer the gut-swaddled, heavily spiced viscera to the finely shaped, impressively marbled large muscles?

It doesn’t really matter, because the real question is: Should we change how we approach sausage? I say no. Sausage exists as the counterpoint to everything else we consume, a destination for the odds and ends of the food-production process. And we should love it not in spite of that but because of it! We should accept sausage for what it is, not wish it were something else, the peer of an exotic French chicken breed or podium-worthy dry-aged Japanese ribeye.

Love requires acceptance, of flaws as well as beauties; love is seeing the truth and loving even more in return. Sausage needs no elevation when it has our adoration. We all know how it’s made, and we all know the sum of its parts is greater than the whole. Its casing cannot contain its genius. It’s magic in a tube. It’s inevitable. It’s the best, and it’s the best because it’s the wurst.

That wasn’t so bad, was it? Don’t worry, tomorrow I’m writing about cancer.

Notes

1. I may be wrong about this.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt