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Attila Fuchs’s

prize winning sausage

This is a tale of a simple peasant farmer, with a smallholding, on the outskirts of Szeged in Hungary.

Szeged is famous for its paprika and its enormous salami sausages, which are made from the meat of an especially heavyweight and large breed of pig, the likes of which can be found nowhere else in the world.

Each year the local people hold ‘The Festival of the Sausage’. There are prizes for the biggest & best sausage, the biggest & best pig and of course the biggest sausage eater. It is around this annual sausage festival, that the life of a Szeged smallholder revolves.

Each of the many Szeged smallholders strives to produce the finest specimen of this especially heavyweight and large breed of pig, to provide his wife with the main ingredient for the production of a prize winning sausage.

This is a very important undertaking, as the smallholder with the best sausage at the sausage festival, is presented with the prize boar – thus gaining a big advantage over his fellow smallholders in producing next years main ingredient

I have fond memories of my father’s smallholding, especially the occasion of his one and only victory in the best sausage contest.

He had struggled for many years to produce a prize-winning sausage. It was always going to be hard for him, as his holding was very small, even for a smallholder.

My mother would do the best she could with what he gave her - but as her mother had told her many times….

My father may have been lacking in the holdings department but his brain was as big as they come. My mother’s mother would often be heard saying…

It all started the day my father saw that Janos Strobl showing off his prize boar in Szechenyi square. We had gone there to sell some of my fathers paprika at the local market but the sight of that prize boar gave my father other ideas. So the plot was hatched and the deed was done and my father always says, with tears in his eyes,….

Janos Strobl was the biggest smallholder in Szeged and he liked to remind everyone of that fact. He was always showing of some prize specimen or other in the market place. His restaurant served the finest salami strarmi (that’s a whole salami served with carrots and swede) in town. As my mother’s mother was always telling my mother...

“You should have married that nice Janos ----- his meat & two veg. are the finest in town.”

Father knew he needed the services of that prize boar if he was to stand any chance of producing a prize pig - that would give my mother the string-free meat she needed for a prize sausage.

He also knew that Janos could not resist any opportunity to taunt my father about the size of his holding, so we made straight for his stall, and as sure as pigs make poop, Janos pounced on my father….

While this friendly banter continued, I was able to slip some of fathers paprika pods into the trough that Janos had prepared for his prize porker. Father knew that one bite would turn that docile creature into a tormented beast, its only aim in life, to drink as much water as it could find and nothing would keep it from reaching its goal.

My task completed, I tipped my father the wink and we hurried off along Hid Street and down to the river Tisza, the banks of which Szeged is built. Father knew that the hotheaded hog would be close on our heels. Its raging thirst would heighten the senses and the sound of the flowing waters of the Tisza, just a few hundred yards from Szechenyi Square, would be irresistible to the poor porker.

Minutes passed like hours and then we heard…screee…screee… the unmistakable sound of a parched porker heading our way.

…(at least I think that’s what father shouted)… and seconds later…screee…screee… and we could see the poor porker, running like a greyhound, straight for us.

But it was the hotheaded hog that caught father… plumb on the privates… as it sped through his bow-legs.

As father hurtled towards the ground, I thought I heard a small choirboy shouting…..

I thought this was odd as it was Saturday morning…. And all the small choirboys of Szeged should have been at choir practice.

There was no time to muse over this thought however….as I grabbed a large fishing net from one of the small boats on the riverbank and propelled myself towards the poor porker….netting my quarry just as it splashed down into the cooling waters of the Tisza.

I don’t know how the small choirboy knew of our plan…..or that we lived down river but it sounded like a good idea, so off I went.

Mother was not concerned when I arrived home alone. Father often sent me on ahead, while he stopped off at the Pig & Whistle to partake of a few jugs of Tavaszi.

I went off to bed, only to be woken in the early hours, by the sound of the small choirboy, telling mother how my father had been attacked by a “vicious swine” down by the river….

Next morning, the prize boar seemed much happier, having spent the night in the sty with our three sows. Come to think of it, they seemed quite cheerful as well.

Father had left me a note telling me to return the porker to Mr. Strobl – ‘and tell him that we found him on our way home from the market.’

Father stayed in bed for about a week, while mother sold everything she could, to buy large amounts of ice from the local store.

“Your father says not to worry Odon, everything will be fine come the next sausage festival”

How right he was. Our three sows produced seventeen piglets between them and father selected the best of the bunch for mother’s ingredients.

Mother worked on the sausage for two days and two nights before presenting father with a real whopper for his curing shed.

Father spent the next three months locked in his shed, tending his sausage, while it matured in the special microclimate of Szeged, created by its proximity to the river Tisza.

Finally the great day arrived. A strange hairy creature emerged from fathers shed carrying our sausage. The site of this caused me to become hysterical but after mother had slapped my face and shook me senseless, I realized it was only father, with three months of facial hair.

He presented his fully matured sausage to mother, who proceeded to stretch a thin sheath over its length, to protect it on its journey to the festival square.

This looked to be very delicate work but mother appeared to be quite used to it. This always seemed strange to me because she only got to do it once a year. I remember asking father about this one day but he went as red as one of his paprika pods and just said I would understand when I was older.

This done, the sausage was lashed to fathers left thigh, ready for its journey to Szechenyi Square, where the festival was always held on the first Sunday in October. This method of transporting the sausage served two purposes. It helped keep the sausage at the correct temperature for serving, while also ensuring that the sausage could not be snatched, by a sausage snatching, jealous rival.

It was a close call for the judges that year – a split decision gave victory to father’s sausage, three to two, over the sausage of Mr. Strobl. Never again would he be heard to say….

But I think he suspected my father had pulled a fast one. He looked madder than a very mad porker, that as just heard his smallholding owner has used his last rasher of bacon.

He was going to get his own back on that Attila Fuchs – if it was the last thing he ever did!