Dear all at the Perfick Place,

Some things you need to take a run up at and some of your sausage varieties have had us wondering who had an overdose of Woodfordes and a weird breakfast the next day. I mean Black Pudding and Strawberry Jam, Bubble and Squeak? Who put these in sausages?

Some culinary genius that is who! Let us start with the Bubble and Squeak, that is what tickled our fancy. Well the owner chopping the new potatoes and cooking them. Asked if he was having a late breakfast he explained he was making sausages and which variety, Bubble and Squeak. Now we like a challenge so we decided to have some of these, after learning that the meat content was still 85% (higher meat means lower carbs for all you calorie counters) and that there was lovely smoked bacon in as well as potatoes and Savoy cabbage, well you just have to try.

The blend is perfect and gives good mouth feel. Once again a feel of meat, no slime and very even distribution of herbs and spices and vegetables. But the taste, the first thing you get is bacon, your lovely smoked bacon, then the pork and spices. The potatoes and cabbages combine succulently resulting in the feeling of Wonkas Meal Gum (read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) but without the Violet Beauregarde side effects. The result is a very festive sausage, that is right this is a Christmas Cracker. If these were chipolatas they would be the ideal side dish to any Christmas turkey. Wrapped in your finest streaky bacon for the best Piggies in Blankets or left as a sausage meat for stuffing the turkey it would be divine. As it is they are a sausage that you will want again and again.

That is a point do you do festive sausage meat stuffings? Pork with Sage and Onion? Pork with Chestnuts and Apricots? Bubble and Squeak would be good too as would Black Pudding and Strawberry Jam!

Which comes very nicely to the second variety of sausage we sampled. Black Pudding and Strawberry Jam. Now this sounds like a craving from the depths of Mother & Baby magazine. Something that a Fusion Chef came up with after a night on Babycham and Mackesons stout. Perhaps something dreamt up to torture the very soul of an HGV driver. But something has always been niggling at me ever since I first saw this sausage and the raft of awards it had garnered. Perhaps I was wrong…

So we ordered a half kilo of these. Now these were dark sausages, they are a subtle shade of black due to their contents. Cooking revealed no sickly sweet smell, indeed there was more of a smell of pork and black pudding (ain’t that a surprise?). Now tasting was a different matter, imagine the three wise monkeys given a blue banana each. You know what it looks like, you know what it smells like but in the manner of 3 curry virgins attempting a Prawn Biryani, nobody wanted to go first. In the end courage was summoned and the first casing was broken. The smell that inveigled the nostrils was simply heaven. Rich pork and black pudding, perhaps just a tiny hint of something confectionery in the background but by now the mouth had hit the fear over ride switch and the first fork full was committed to consumption! The black pudding is foremost, that lovely rich deep flavour that your home made black has, so rich and velvety takes centre stage, the pork sausagemeat compliments the deep dark notes, but somewhere like a shooting star across the sky or a flute in an orchestra the strawberry jam will make a brief and surprisingly welcome appearance before disappearing back behind the dark shadows of the black pudding. Fusion chefs can learn a lot from a sausage. We will of course be ordering more of both of these, as well as the ones with marmalade in, got to try them all now! Anyway see you all soon and ready the sausages!

Many thanks

Mike Carter