Sun, Oct 02, 2005 page12

• The banger revolution

  Sausage sales are up by almost a quarter since 2000 in the UK, while organics have tripled, as manufacturers remake the formerly humble food into `posh nosh'

  • THE GUARDIAN
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  When the time comes to choose a symbol for social change in Britain, we would do well to consider the sausage. Sixty-five years ago, high society was outraged when US president Franklin Roosevelt decided to serve hotdogs at an official dinner for George VI and the late Queen Mother. The first lady, Eleanor, had to issue a statement reassuring critics -- including her own mother -- that there would be more dignified alternatives on the menu. Today, the brand leader in the British market for "super-premium" sausages is the royal couple's grandson Prince Charles. His Duchy Originals come in gold-embossed wrapping and are so grand they have their own assembly line, which no lesser sausage is allowed to sully.

  Duchy swine are rubbed with suntan cream in hot weather and have footballs in their sties to reduce stress. The marketing material describes free-range, organic herds "which live outside in family groups and have warm shelters with straw bedding and mud baths in summer" -- a blissful scene calculated to appeal to discerning consumers.

  And there are a lot of those. A survey last month by the analysts Mintel showed that premium bangers full of real meat and fresh herbs are being made in Britain at a rate unprecedented for decades. Sales are up by almost a quarter since 2000, and organics have tripled.

  

  Sausage shop manager Tom Jackson hangs another batch of premium sausages in his shop window in central London in this photo taken on Sept. 14. The great British sausage is undergoing a revival, and Britons are expected to consume the equivalent of 140 links each this year.

  PHOTO: AP

  "Manufacturers are reinventing sausages as posh nosh," Mintel's David Bird said.

  There are vast, impersonal forces at play here: more money in consumers' purses, greater health awareness, the regulatory effect of the EU. But levers have also been pulled by astute individuals. The British sausage revolution really took off on a spring morning in 1995 when two Yorkshiremen spotted a shop called Simply Sausages on London's Farringdon Road.

  Within hours, they had negotiated a joint venture with the shop's owner, Martin Heap. He was a former restaurateur with a genius for inventing speciality sausages; they were Bernard Hoggarth and Martin Davey, managing director and chairman of the Yorkshire company Cranswick Country Foods.

  "Basically, our aim for the last 10 years has been to turn Martin Heap into a science," Cranswick's sales director, Jim Brisby said.

  People are passionate about pigs in East Riding, Yorkshire. Radio Humberside is having a discussion about them as the traffic lines up at Hull's swing bridge and past a succession of roundabouts to the factory at the heart of the sausage renaissance.

  "What's a saddleback pig?" wonders the presenter.

  "The black and white ones," a listener texts, going to the trouble to add: "Of course."

  Here people look at pigs -- which greatly outnumber humans on both banks of the Humber -- and see VLPs.

  "Visual lean percentage," Brisby explains. "Lean meat was about half the animal for years, but these days it's regularly up to 65 percent and more. Pigs are getting less fat because people want more meat."

  Breeders have changed the shape of the animal in the past decade from a "leg and loiner", to give bacon and chops, to a "shoulder and belly" for meaty bangers. That's handy for today's premium sausages, which might contain 65 percent meat, or super-premium, with still more.

  And it's the latest stage in a venerable history. Sausages first appear in Western literature in The Odyssey, and were such a favorite of the Romans that they were allegedly banned (alas, there is no proof) on the empire's conversion to Christianity because of their use in orgies during the festival of Lupercalia -- and not just as food. But while continental countries developed a tradition of high meat content and skilful use of herbs, Britain was content with recipes that would have been familiar to Homer, whose heros filled their bangers "with fat and blood."

  The premier British chroniclers of the sausage, Anthony and Araminta Hippisley Coxe, recall how a Belgian charcutier took refuge with Anthony's family during World War II, and came home from the butchers aghast at the lack of meat being stuffed into the tubes of intestine. Hitler finished the job with his U-boat blockade. The British had to eat sausages full of rusk and what was euphemistically called "flesh," a definition including such things as head muscle and tail. Even now, food regulations allow a sausage to contain as little as 30 percent "meat" (which is, at least, defined more strictly than "flesh") among all the water, fat, rusk, wheatflour and so on.

  Cranswick began in 1972 as the East Riding Quality Bacon Producers' Association, a cooperative of 23 farmers who met in the village of Hutton Cranswick after auditing their pig feed bills and deciding they were being ripped off. They clubbed together and built their own feedmill. The money came in, and they poached Martin Davey from the fiercely competitive West Yorkshire textile world. The self-made son of an Irish scaffolder, he knew how to make a business expand.

  He also had a nearby model: the Associated Dairies co-op of Yorkshire Dales farmers, who combined to do their own pasteurising and eventually became ASDA.

  "Backing quality is never a bad business decision," said Brisby, a graduate in management science who was brought up with pigs on the family farm at Malton in North Yorkshire (though he sneezes whenever he meets one, because he developed an allergy to them). "The first expansion came from the pig feed, rather than the pigs. The company bought a pet-food firm. That led to more looking around."

  Similar speciality buyouts have now made Cranswick, which is worth some ?220 million (US$388 million), the country's biggest importer of fresh Italian pasta, as well as a big player in sandwich making (and, bizarrely, seahorse breeding). They also accounted for the instant rapport between Hoggarth and Davey and Heap. And, as with previous purchases, the company's East Riding base proved a godsend for sausage-making. There was an abundance of skilled workers locally, not to mention the pigs.

  The sausage factory and its 250 staff are on Helsinki Road, off Oslo Road -- names from the mid-20th century when the port's fleet dominated northern waters and fish processing was big. Freezing cold and partly icebound, Mike Finn's herb store at Cranswick resembles the deck of the Arctic trawler on which he used to serve, except it doesn't reek of fish.

  "I get home of a night smelling very nice now," Finn said.

  He is pungent with parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, and -- his favorite -- the aniseed scent of Florence fennel.

  All sorts of dignitaries have been to sniff at herbs on tours round the sausage factory, officially known as Lazenby's after another little specialist firm, Mr Lazenby's Sausages, which joined Martin Heap's Simply Sausages in the Cranswick family.

  This is a seven-day-a-week operation. Quality controllers in orange helmets stalk about like herons, pecking at random samples or nabbing a Duchy Originals pack whose wrapping has come unstuck. Although the lines are computerized (the current building is less than a year old), flaws are noted in old-fashioned ledgers.

  Attention to detail is relatively simple in a small business. The point about Cranswick and its part in the comeback of the real sausage is that processes once familiar only to local butchers or niche operations such as Martin Heap's are now applied on a mass-market scale. Cranswick has 35 percent of the premium and super-premium markets and can claim to have kick-started them. Perhaps the most significant thing about Davey and Hoggarth's trip to London in 1995 was where they were going when they diverted to Simply Sausages: Sainsbury's headquarters, to cut deals involving mass distribution of specialist food.

  Supermarkets have had much consumerist stick in recent years, but when they decide to adopt a particular line, they have clout. Although delayed, the meeting went ahead, and it wasn't long before Sainsbury's was challenging Cranswick to come up with the "ultimate sausage."

  "Try one," Brisby said, proffering a plate of what are now called Ultimates, newly fried in the factory's kitchen. Ninety-five percent meat, it's yummy.

  "People have a thing about sausages," Brisby said. "We've all got childhood memories of them. You like thinking about what you would put in the ideal sausage and these days there are lots more ideas. You go on holiday and eat parma ham or pancetta and come back here and expect to get it too."
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