10 things you didn’t know about sausages

2013 has been an amazing year for sausages and Sausagefans.co.uk!  I’ve been all over the UK looking for sausage perfection.  I’ve met some amazing people and tried some amazing sausages, it really has been the year of the sausage!

Here are ten things you didn’t know about sausages in the UK (maybe).

1. About 5 million people eat about 12 million sausages every day in the UK.

2. The market for sausages in the UK is worth a staggering £743 million!  That’s a lot of sausage!

3. Approximately 188,270 metric tons of sausage was consumed in the UK last year!  Laid end to end this gives us enough chipolatas to:

• Form a wall, four sausages high, around the entire coastline of Great Britain!
• Cover a distance from London to Perth in Australia and back twice!
• Wrap around the London Eye, the capital’s Millennium wheel, 129 thousand times!
• Add another layer, 10 sausages high, to the entire length of the Great Wall of China!

4. We have nearly 500 different sorts of sausages in the UK, take into account the different ways that butchers make those sausages and you can eat a different sausage every day for 10 years!

5. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first specific reference in English came in a fifteenth century vocabulary ‘Salcicia’, a ‘sawsage’

6. Sausagefans.co.uk has over 1300 sausage makers listed, all recommended by website visitors for inclusion.

7. The most expensive sausage ever was made from Fillet steak with Champagne and truffles and cost £20 a pack.

8. Sausage machines can fill sausages at a rate of 1.5 miles an hour.

9. In 320 AD, because of their association with pagan festivals, Roman Emperor Constantinus I and the Catholic Church made sausage eating a sin and their consumption was banned! This led to sausages going underground until the ban was lifted.

10. Once made, sausages used to be stuck up chimneys to be mildly cured.

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about the amazing British sausage!  You can find out more at www.sausagefans.co.uk.  Make sure I have your favourite sausage maker listed in the directory and let me know if not!