How sausages made their way into our diets and conquered the world

Sign up to IndyEat's free newsletter for weekly recipes, foodie features and cookbook releases Get our food and drink newsletter for free Get our food and drink newsletter for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, composed perhaps 10,000 years ago, describes luscious goat sausages glistening on a grill: “As when a man besides a great fire has filled a sausage with fat and blood and turns it this way and that and is very eager to get it quickly roasted.” But what exactly is a sausage? open image in gallery ‘Peasants slaughtering a pig’, by Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel Sausages emerged independently in many different parts of the world because they are an exceptionally good way of using up small scraps of meat and because they offer a means to preserve perishable flesh from rot and decay. Sausages are intensely regional – the translator of one Italian food history lamented his inability to render into English the more than 60 different Italian words that exist to describe pork and beef sausages alone. British cookbooks often included recipes for making sausages – Susanna Pitts, of Birdingbury, in Warwickshire, wrote down a recipe for “the best sausages that ever were eat” in her handwritten 18th-century cookbook.