Sausages: An Anthology

For no particular reason, here are some extracts from British fiction about sausages. The first few are primarily about breakfast – the real thing, not that Full English Breakfast that was invented by marketing people.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness (1926)
‘What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages? God bless my soul, what’s the world coming to, eh, Colonel?’

P. C. Wren, Beau Geste (1924)
Digby was wandering about the room, a plate of porridge in one hand, and a busy spoon in the other. Augustus was at the sideboard removing cover after cover, and adding sausages to eggs and rashers of bacon.
‘Good effort, Gus,’ said Digby, eyeing the piled mass as he passed him with his empty porridge plate. ‘Shove some kedgeree on top.’
‘Had it,’ said Augustus. ‘This is going on top of the kedgeree.’
‘Stout citizen,’ approved Digby, getting himself a clean plate.

John Buchan, The Three Hostages (1924)
Presently, as I was garaging the car in an outhouse, Sandy appeared in flannel bags and a tweed jacket, looking as fresh as paint and uncommonly sunburnt.
‘I hope you’re hungry,’ he said.  ‘Capital fellow the landlord!  He knows what a man’s appetite is.  I ordered eggs, kidneys, sausages and cold ham, and he seemed to expect it.’

Margery Allingham, Dancers in Mourning (1937)
At six o’clock breakfast arrived from the Red Lion over the way and the superintendent entertained his own inspector and the two distinguished visitors to the meal in his office. Yeo had become a new man since the message from the Records Department. The hunt was up and he was getting into his stride. His good humour had developed a certain vigorousness which might have been almost horrific in a less attractive personality. He sat eating a great plateful of bacon, fried egg, sausage and steak, his round eyes sharp and eager and his stubby fingers crumbling his bread as if he felt it represented an enemy.

H. G. Wells, Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905)
Kipps made a very special thing of his breakfast. Daily once hopeless dreams came true then. It had been customary in the Emporium to supplement Shalford’s generous, indeed unlimited, supply of bread and butter-substitute, by private purchases, and this had given Kipps very broad, artistic conceptions of what the meal might be. Now there would be a cutlet or so or a mutton chop – this splendour Buggins had reported from the great London club – haddock, kipper, whiting or fish-balls, eggs, boiled or scrambled, or eggs and bacon, kidney also frequently and sometimes liver. Amidst a garland of such themes, sausages, black and white puddings, bubble-and-squeak, fried cabbage and scallops came and went. Always as camp followers came potted meat in all varieties, cold bacon, German sausage, brawn, marmalade and two sorts of jam, and when he had finished these he would sit among his plates and smoke a cigarette and look at all these dishes crowded round him with a beatific approval. It was his principal meal.

Sapper, Bulldog Drummond (1920)
‘Breakfast in half an hour,’ she cried from inside – ‘not that one of you deserves it.’
‘We are forgiven,’ remarked Drummond, as he joined the other three on the lawn. ‘Do any of you feel like breakfast? Fat sausages and crinkly bacon.’
‘Shut up,’ groaned Algy, ‘or we’ll throw you into the river. What I want is a brandy-and-soda – half a dozen of ‘em.’

John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)
I lay and tortured myself – for the ginger biscuits merely emphasized the aching void – with the memory of all the good food I had thought so little of in London. There were Paddock’s crisp sausages and fragrant shavings of bacon, and shapely poached eggs – how often I had turned up my nose at them! There were the cutlets they did at the club, and a particular ham that stood on the cold table, for which my soul lusted. My thoughts hovered over all varieties of mortal edible, and finally settled on a porterhouse steak and a quart of bitter with a welsh rabbit to follow. In longing hopelessly for these dainties I fell asleep.

Louis Tracy, The King of Diamonds (1904)
At that instant a savoury smell was wafted to him. He was passing a small restaurant, where sausages and onions sizzled gratefully in large, tin trays, and pork chops lay in inviting prodigality amid rich, brown gravy. The proprietor, a portly and greasy man, with bald head and side whiskers, was standing at the door exchanging views as to business with his next-door neighbour, a greengrocer.

Richmal Crompton, Just William (1922)
So far the Outlaws had limited their activities to wrestling matches, adventure seeking, and culinary operations. The week before, they had cooked two sausages which William had taken from the larder on cook’s night out and had conveyed to the barn beneath his shirt and next his skin. Perhaps ‘cooked’ is too euphemistic a term. To be quite accurate, they had held the sausages over a smoking fire till completely blackened, and then consumed the charred remains with the utmost relish.

Rudyard Kipling, Stalky & Co. (1899)
He came back, greatly disordered, to find McTurk, Stalky, and the others of the company, in his study enjoying an unlimited ‘brew’—coffee, cocoa, buns, new bread hot and steaming, sardine, sausage, ham-and-tongue paste, pilchards, three jams, and at least as many pounds of Devonshire cream.

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939):
The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren’t much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly – pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! … That’s the way we’re going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over.

And finally, a couple of non-fiction extracts, as Rudyard Kipling remembers his early days in London in the 1890s, and novelist James Hilton recalls his schooldays during the First World War…

Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself (1937)
My rooms were above an establishment of Harris the Sausage King, who, for tuppence, gave as much sausage and mash as would carry one from breakfast to dinner when one dined with nice people who did not eat sausage for a living.

James Hilton, To You, Mr Chips (1938)
I cannot forget the little room where my friends and I fried sausages over a gas-ring and played George Robey records on the gramophone, and how, in that same little room with the sausages frying and the gramophone playing, one of us received a telegram with bad news in it, and how we all tried to sympathise, yet in the end arrived at no better idea than to open a hoarded tin of pineapple chunks to follow the sausages.