Homemade Sausage:

Grilled Sausages
Photo by Salim Fadhely

Sausages are delectable little bits that are usually made of scraps of meat and fat leftover from butchering.  The animal that is used most often is a pig although sausages can be made from any other meat and fat combination.  Most of us are familiar with breakfast sausage and breakfast patties.  However, this is just a sampling of what else is to be found in the world of sausages.  So are hotdogs.

Not only are sausages made from ground up meat and fat scraps but they are also seasoned with herbs and spices to improve their flavor.  The common breakfast sausage is seasoned with the herb “Sage” that gives it its distinctive flavor.  Kielbasa is another form of sausage made from a combination of pork and beef although the best ones are made from beef alone.

Even blood enters into the recipes for sausages, and these sausages are common in northern Europe, and have followed our European Ancestors to the Americas.  The blood sausage has vegetable fillers added as many other types of sausage do as well.  Commonly this filler is nothing more then oatmeal.

Another form of sausage was developed by the Indians that we all know as Pemmican.  This was made in patties and used as survival food or when the Indians were traveling and needed a high energy food.

The most unusual sausage the author has eaten is made from venison by a Canadian friend that seasons them with habanera peppers, the hottest one the Scotch Bonnet.”  They’re so hot they will make the sweat run down your back.  He produces these commercially for the islanders in the Caribbean.

Most sausages are incased in a length of natural gut, usually a piece of sheep gut that has been thoroughly cleaned and washed.  This is the most expensive product produced in the slaughtering of animals.  The seasoned meet is forced into the length of gut under pressure by a special machine made for this purpose although it can be accomplished with a meat grinder that has been equipped with a special nozzle.  To find the proper equipment you should Google, sausage making supplies.

In the process of making sausages you can use your adventurous spirit and see what you’re are able to invent yourself.  More then once a really good recipe is able to be developed commercially.  Several sausage makers have gone on to set up shop in their towns and have earned a good living making sausages.

Making Pemmican the Indian Way

Cree Indian in the old days

Pemmican was derived from its use as an emergency food by the Cree Indians in Canada.  It is made by preparing strips of game meat such as bison, moose or venison by drying them either in the sun or before a campfire until they were hard.  The meat was then pounded into a powder using stones, and mixed 50/50% with fat from the animal.  A mixture of berries was pounded into the pemmican for additional flavor and added nutrition.  Ordinary pemmican was made from dried buffalo meat and fat.  By adding berries to the pemmican it was more apt to spoil.  Ordinary pemmican however was still edible after as much as 30 years.

The Métis central Canada native people who made their living trapping eventually became the biggest suppliers of pemmican.  They supplied it to the Canadian government the Hudson Bay Company, the US government and anyone else that bought the stuff.  Making pemmican was actually a work for the women of the group.  They used to cut the lean buffalo meat into strips about a quarter of an inch thick and hang on a rack made out of willow twig bows that were interlocked in such a way as to form a framework.  The buffalo meat was hung in this rack and was either dried by the hot sun or place close to an open flame.  The finished product of this step we’re all familiar with as jerked beef.  It was dry and hard.  The womenfolk pounded it into a powder between two stones.  When the meat is thoroughly powdered it was placed in a kettle and an equal volume of hot water was added.  This was thoroughly stirred together with the powdered meat forming ordinary pemmican.  They then poured it into rawhide sacks for storage.  While the mixture was in the sack and still hot they trod on it with their feet in order to flatten the pemmican into a slab for later use.  If they were going to make what was called festive pemmican they added fruits and berries, but this kind of pemmican did not have been keeping qualities of ordinary pemmican.