It’s that time of year again; yes it’s the busiest time of the butchery calendar but also my yearly jolly up trip to France. It’s turned into a yearly trip with my mates and the Volvo estates boot is getting lower each year we go. Full of cheese, pates, wine and other delights including white chocolate lion bars. But it was one item that jumped out at me this year. I’m a huge sausage lover and it was making them at home that inspired me to enter the butchery trade. I’ve made lots of different type and tasted hundreds of types from the basic pork to kangaroo. But sitting on the shelf in the supermarket city Europe meat counter was mini saucissons de cheval fumes fecules (horse sausage). Now I’m always interested in tasting new meats and products, so this was an offer to good to turn my nose up. Two euros for about ten cocktail horse sausages seemed very cheap and I dread to think of the quality of the meat but I’m sure horses live a decent life as it was killed and born in France. After we got back to London a little tired and a lighter wallet I couldn’t wait to taste them. But I wasn’t sure on how best to cook them as they looked like a boiling sausage. So I decided to take them to work and ask the guys in the la Marche de counter in the market, but as luck had it my friend Adam Perry Laing who is the king of the bbq popped in, and he can talk and read French. He filled me in with all the information, 51% horse meat, 20% pork fat and the rest with stupid E numbers and horrid coloring agents, but he said they were smoked as well, and told me best to par boil them then slowly fry them. So with the bad news that they were filled with E numbers and other wired stuff I still wanted to try them. So I cooked them to the instruction and let them cool slightly and tasted them. Well they were horrid, tasted like a cheap frankfurter. More like a meat paste with smoking flavorings packed into the fake casings. I was very sausaged off! But the search for a decent horse sausage is not up, and if you can help me find a good horse banger please tell me.
Charlie the Butcher.
please be so kind as to drop horse and horses as tags….it is incredibly disconcerting to run a search for horses to find this….
Please understand,it is none of my business what you do….I’m a gourmand myself! But your blog is showing up amidst horse lovers who would sooner eat their kid than their horse…
halfpass – for those of us who don’t have kids this is a good alternative…. assuming of course the sausages are not really that colour, that’s really not natural
touche….LOL
Chaz McBaz. I had the misfortune of eating a horse streak from France not too long along, tough as old boots it was. Also fried up some lamb testicles last week, courtesy of fathers recent trip to France. Surprisingly tasty with a bit of garlic and parsley on toast. You have much of a market for them at your shop?
Nevermind the sausages, I need to find the white chocolate lion bars!!
I heard that Belgium has great horse sausage!
You might ask for horse sausage at a good Polish deli. They make some very tasty ones here. (kabanosy z konia).