Take some fresh meat; mix it with plenty of salt; leave it hanging around for a while and bingo – you’ve got a cured sausage. While this sounds pretty basic (and very dangerous with today’s health and safety standards!), this is essentially how meat is cured and made into charcuterie. It’s a technique that’s been around for millennia, utilised by civilisations the world over to preserve meat for the days, weeks and months ahead. Today, there are thousands of cured meats documented from around the world, many of which fall into the category of 'sausages'. At their core, sausages are made with minced or finely chopped meat that’s then salted and stuffed into casings (usually an intestine or internal organ lining of some kind) with all manner of other ingredients and flavourings, then left to mature or eaten fresh. When you write it out like that it doesn’t sound like the most appealing food in the world, but as we all know – nothing really beats a top-quality sausage.
The first written evidence of sausage-making dates back to Ancient Greece (‘morcilla’ (blood sausage) was mentioned in Homer’s The Odyssey), and since then (and quite likely before then, too) cultures from every corner of the globe have been producing and enjoying sausages in all sorts of shapes and forms. In Spain, however, the one sausage to rule them all has to be chorizo – the red-hued, garlicky, spiced and often smoked pork sausage that imbues its flavourful oil into every dish it touches. But it’s evolved and transformed quite a bit over the centuries to become the sausage we know and love today.