The manufacture of sausage and related meat products--although it began over two thousand years ago--is still a growing industry. While some of its basic practices are almost as old as civilization, the industry is constantly adopting new developments in processing in the light of later scientific and technical knowledge.
Sausage has been an important item in man's diet for twenty centuries. The first recognizable mention of this meat food is found in a Greek play called "The Orya," or "The Sausage," written about 500 B.C. Thereafter the word for sausage occurs with frequency in Greek writings. It's also a favorite food of the Romans, at one time becoming so popular for festive occasions that it was placed under the ban of the early church.
The modern word "sausage" is derived from the Latin ~salsus~, meaning salted. The term was probably originally applied to cured or salted meat generally. German sausage makers--although making the greatest contribution to the technique of sausage manufacture--failed to supplant the word "sausage" with their "wurst."
Sausage still has several characteristics which it has probably possessed from almost the earliest times. Modern American products, whether derived from Northern, Central or Southern European types, have all or most of the following qualities:
1.~The main ingredient--meat--is chopped or ground. It consists of carcass cuts, trimmings and other edible parts.
2.~The comminuted meat mass is stuffed in either natural or artificial castings, muslin or paper bags or is wrapped in parchment or transparent paper to protect it from contamination, excessive loss of moisture and spoilage.
3.~The meat is either cured, seasoned, smoked, dried or otherwise processed so that its keeping quality is increased over that of fresh product. The amount of strictly fresh sausage manufactured is not large in relation to total sausage output.
The above characteristics give some clue to the utilitarian reasons for sausage development, especially when it is remembered that meat preservation was a great problem before the days of modern refrigeration. Equally important in sausage development were taste considerations, in which human liking for spices and other seasoning played an important part. There is probably no other processed food product in which utility and appetite appeal are as well combined as in sausage.
The first forms of sausage are unknown, although it is possible they may have been of the fresh type, variously seasoned. .It is probable that some kinds of dry sausage were also developed early since the name Salami has been applied to a sausage of this type since the time of the Greeks. The Romans had a fresh sausage in which pork was chopped fine with pine nuts and seasoned with cumin seed, bay leaves, and black pepper.
Sausage may be roughly divided into three classes: fresh, cooked and dry. These had separate centers of origin in Europe. Dry sausage was mainly produced in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, particularly Italy, while cooked and fresh sausages were developed principally in the Northern Teutonic area. There seems to have been some interchange of Sausage-making information and overlapping of types from the early times, however.
The warm climate, which made meat preservation difficult, was an important factor in the development of dry sausage in Greece, Italy and other Southern European countries. The preserving processes of curing with salt and controlled drying, and the use of strong seasoning, were combined on making dry sausage. The resulting products could be kept for long periods and stored against the months of scarcity or greatest heat. The term "summer sausage" was applied to all kinds of dry sausage in the Mediterranean countries, where they were made in winter for summer consumption.
Growth in importance of the Italian city-states during the middle ages and the Renaissance period probably gave some impetus to the sausage-making art. There were large numbers of potential customers in the cities, many of them with educated palates, and craftsman could find steady employment in making sausage to sell to them. Moreover, many of these cities were engaged in trade with Asia, and the spices and seasoning so necessary to sausage were thus available. Some types became so closely associated with the cities in which they originated or were made that they have borne the cities names ever since. Thus genoa sausage derives its name from Genoa, Italy; milano from Milan; romano from Rome; bologna from Bologna, and sorrento from a city in Sicily of that name.
On account of cooler climate, the problem of perishability was not so important in Northern and Central Europe, and many kinds of fresh and cooked sausage were developed by the Germanic peoples who lived there. Most of the products were only mildly cured and seasoned, and were smoked for preservation and flavor and then cooked. The natural refrigeration of springhouses and caves would keep such sausage fresh until eaten. Frankfurts and liver sausage are typical of this class of product. The Northern Europeans also produced some kinds of semi-dry sausage which are known today as summer sausage.
Cities and provinces in this area also gave their names to sausage products. The frankfurt took its name from Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany; berliner from Berlin; braunschweiger from Braunschweig or Brunswick; weiners from Vienna; goteborg from Gothenberg, Sweden; strassburg from Strassburg. a city of Alsace-Lorraine, and lyons from Lyons, France.
European sausage making (and meat processing) has been, and still is, carried on largely by small concerns which purvey the products made direct to consumers. Sausage is manufactured in small quantities under the watchful eye of a master workman. Only fresh materials are used, and quality of the resulting product is high. Such conditions are typical of sausage-making in Germany, which became the center of the art several hundred years ago. German craftsmen have continued to maintain the high quality of their art, and at the same time have balanced it with practical developments, some of which have made modern sausage manufacture possible.
England originated few kinds of sausage and contributed little to manufacturing methods, so the English settlers in the United States probably brought only a little sausage knowledge with them. There was probably only some sausage made on farms, in cities and in the German and Dutch settlements during the colonial days. But the American sausage industry seems to have begun its real growth during pre-and post-Civil war days in the meat packing centers, which began to develop on both sides of the Alleghenies. Many of these meat packing and sausage manufacturing concerns were started by Germans or employed many workman of this nationality. It was only natural that they should introduce the German types of sausage and German methods of manufacture.
Sausage manufacture in the Untied States today is an important division of American meat packing industry, and is also carried on by hundreds of independent sausage manufacturers. The combined production of sausage. meat puddings, etc., in the U.S. sausage and meat packing industries during 1935( the latest year for which U.S. Bureau of Census figures are available) amounted to 1,352,545,000 pounds.
The 1,223 meat packing establishments in the United States turned out 844,454,000 pounds of the above total, while 808 concerns primarily engaged in sausage manufacture produced 478,171,000 pounds. In addition, 29,820,000 pounds of sausage were made by those not engaged directly in meat packing or sausage manufacturing.
During 1935 United States production was divided between the sausage and meat packing industries as follows:
................................Sausage Industry.... Packing Industry
Fresh sausage, etc..........438,093,000..........751,809,000
Dry sausage......................39,827,000............73,599,000
Canned sausage.....................251,000............19,146.000
*Total...............................478,171,000.........844,454,000
*In addition, 25,821,000 lbs. of fresh sausage and 3,999,000 lbs. of dry sausage were made in other industries.
Aggregate value of sausage products made in the sausage, meat packing and other industries in the United States during 1935 was $233,053,806, in which the share of the sausage manufacturing industry proper was $82,890,324. The share of the meat packing industry was $144,984,683 and the share of other industries was $5,178,799.
The 808 sausage manufacturing concerns employed 9,164 wage earners in 1935 and spent $103,401,633 for materials, containers, fuel and purchased energy, and their products were valued at $130,094,926( including output of products not normally belonging to the industry valued at $34,548,140, casing production valued at $7,417,602, and unclassified sausage and casing output of $5,238,860).
A wide variety of sausages were processed and manfuctured during this era. This country has adopted many foreign types of sausages outright, has adopted others to meet American conditions and methods of manufacture and has even originated some of its own. 10 or 15 of the more popular kinds account for the bulk of production in the USA but there are several hundred other varieties which are more or less regularly manufactured.
The field can be widened considerably by including meat loaves. I could bore you with a lot of facts and figures but lets get right to the nitty gritty. It might be intresting to note that in those days, 2 cents a pound was considered to be a good profit!
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