page_title: Sausage
section_title: Britain and Ireland
hierarchical_section_title: Sausage / National varieties / Europe / Britain and Ireland
caption_attribution_description: English: Sausages, seen in Covered Market, Oxford.
context_page_description: Sausages are a meat product usually made from ground meat, often pork, beef, or poultry, along with salt, spices and other flavourings. Other ingredients such as grains or breadcrumbs may be included as fillers or extenders. Some sausages include other ingredients for flavour.
  The word "sausage" can refer to the loose sausage meat, which can be formed into patties or stuffed into a skin. When referred to as "a sausage," the product is usually cylindrical and encased in a skin.
  Typically, a sausage is formed in a casing traditionally made from intestine but sometimes from synthetic materials. Sausages that are sold raw are cooked in many ways, including pan-frying, broiling and barbecuing. Some sausages are cooked during processing and the casing may then be removed.
  Sausage making is a traditional food preservation technique. Sausages may be preserved by curing, drying, smoking, or freezing. Some cured or smoked sausages can be stored without refrigeration. Most fresh sausages must be refrigerated or frozen until they are cooked.
context_section_description: In the UK and Ireland, sausages are a very popular and common feature of the national diet and popular culture. British sausages and Irish sausages are normally made from raw (i.e., uncooked, uncured, unsmoked) pork, beef, venison or other meats mixed with a variety of herbs and spices and cereals, many recipes of which are traditionally associated with particular regions (for example Cumberland sausages). They normally contain a certain amount of rusk or bread-rusk, and are traditionally cooked by frying, grilling or baking. They are most typically 10–15 cm (3.9–5.9 in) long, the filling compressed by twisting the casing into concatenated "links" into the sausage skin, traditionally made from the prepared intestine of the slaughtered animal; most commonly a pig.
  Due to their habit of often exploding due to shrinkage of the tight skin during cooking, they are often referred to as bangers, particularly when served with the most common accompaniment of mashed potatoes to form a bi-national dish known as bangers and mash.
  Famously, they are an essential component of a full English or Irish breakfast. Some are made to traditional regional recipes such as those from Cumberland or Lincolnshire and, increasingly, to modern recipes which combine fruit such as apples or apricots with the meat or are influenced by other European styles such as the Toulouse sausage or chorizo. Vegetarian sausages are also now very widely available, although traditional meatless recipes such as the Welsh Selsig Morgannwg also exist.
  A popular and widespread snack is the sausage roll made from sausage-meat rolled in puff pastry; they are sold from most bakeries and often made at home. Sausages may be baked in a Yorkshire pudding batter to create "toad in the hole", often served with gravy and onions, or they may be cooked with other ingredients in a sausage casserole. In most areas, "sausage meat" for frying and stuffing into poultry or other meats is sold as ground, spiced meat without casing. Battered sausage, consisting of a sausage dipped in batter, and fried, is sold throughout Britain from Fish and Chip shops. In England, the saveloy is a type of pre-cooked sausage, larger than a typical hot-dog, which is served hot. A saveloy skin was traditionally colored with bismarck-brown dye giving saveloy a distinctive bright red color.
  A thin variety of sausage, known as the chipolata is often wrapped in bacon and served alongside roast turkey at Christmas time and are known as Pigs in a Blanket or "Pigs in Blankets". They are also served cold at children's parties throughout the year. The word derives from the Italian "cipolatta", "onioned" or made with onion, although its meaning has been forgotten and it need not contain onion. Black pudding, white pudding and Hog's pudding are fairly similar to their Scottish and European counterparts. Following concerns about health and user preference (distaste for horsemeat), heightened by the BSE crisis in the 1990s and the 2013 horsemeat scandal, the quality of the meat content in many British sausages improved with a return to the artisanal production of high quality traditional recipes, which had previously been in decline. However, many cheaper sausages contain mechanically recovered meat or meat slurry, which must be so listed on packaging.
  There are various laws concerning the meat content of sausages in the UK. The minimum meat content to be labelled Pork Sausages is 42% (30% for other types of meat sausages), although to be classed as meat, the Pork can contain 30% fat and 25% connective tissue. Often the cheapest supermarket pork sausages do not have the necessary meat content to be described as "pork sausages" and are simply labelled "sausages"; with even less meat content they are described as "bangers" (an unregulated name). These typically contain MRM which was previously included in meat content, but under later EU law cannot be so described.
caption: Sausages, seen in The Covered Market, Oxford
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon PowerShot A550", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "180", "Image YResolution": "180", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image DateTime": "2009:01:03 12:54:07", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "196", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "180", "Thumbnail YResolution": "180", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "5108", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "7209", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/60", "EXIF FNumber": "13/5", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "200", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2009:01:03 12:54:07", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2009:01:03 12:54:07", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "5", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "189/32", "EXIF ApertureValue": "11/4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "11/4", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, auto mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "29/5", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3072", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2304", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "Interoperability RelatedImageWidth": "3072", "Interoperability RelatedImageLength": "2304", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "3100", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "40960/3", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "2304000/169", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}