The Great Taste Of Sausage: The sobrasada

Let's just say that you were to pick up a copy of an English newspaper and in it you were to read about hotels in England making a big deal about having pork pies, Cumberland sausage and scones on their menus. You might think, so what. Or you might think, that doesn't sound like something to brag about. You would of course be right to think this.

Compare this non-news with what you get served up locally. As an example - forty hotels in Mallorca now include sobrasada amongst their other delicacies, which could well include ensaïmadas and empanadillas. Fantastic, you might think. Better get yourself off to one of these hotels for some sausage, some lard cake and a pie that bears a relationship, sans spud, to the Cornish pasty.

While it would be most unlikely that you would dash off a hotel reservation on the basis of this gastronomic mix, you would, were you to have booked in to one of these 40 hotels, be able to sample some traditional and basic Mallorcan grub. And it would be, so says the president of the geographic identification of the sobrasada, "fundamental" (basic, if you like) that, as a tourist, you get to "know and try the most traditional" of the island's sausages. It would be even more fundamental, if you happened to be German, so goes a different line of geographic identification from this head sausage-maker, because Germans of course eat nothing else other than sausages.

The sausage, of whatever variety, is still a sausage. I have never been able to look one in the eye in quite the same way since the time that an old friend, climbing the managerial ladder at Sainsbury's, once regaled me (if this is the right term) with his story of a trip to the sausage factory. Despite what might be said to the contrary, you can be reasonably assured that any sausage contains parts of a pig you'd rather not think about.

Ah yes, but there's sausage and then there's sausage. Plastic-wrapped and pink abominations and superior, haute-hype-cuisine, stuffed with paprika and with a geographic identification, making it sound like it's under surveillance by satellite-positioning technology. Step forward, please, the sobrasada.

To be fair, and assuming you can ignore what it is you might actually be putting inside you, the sobrasada is pretty damn tasty. But it can't get over the fact that it remains what it is - a sausage. And there's tasty and there's tasty. A Cornish pasty can be pretty damn tasty, too, but there is not the same hullabaloo surrounding a pasty as there is the sobrasada, even if it is also identified geographically.

Maybe there are presidents of the pasty society in Cornwall, of the Cumberland sausage guild or the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association going around, insisting that it is "fundamental" that tourists scoff the local fare. But if there are, I suspect they are not doing so with quite the same pretensions or demands as the sobrasada propagandists. Fundamental, fundamental - you will try our sausage. You will like it.

This insistence comes with a business dimension, especially where Germany is concerned. So enamoured of sausage are Germans that the sobrasada league is eyeing up the German market as a way of beefing up (well, you don't pork up) sobrasada sales. Which is fair enough, but how much sausage can one nation, even one as porker as the German nation, smother in mustard and wash down with lager?

Placing the sobrasada, or indeed the ensaïmada or empanadilla, in front of a tourist is perfectly reasonable. Each is representative of the current, touristically-correct philosophy of local sourcing by hotels. But which are these 40 hotels? I fancy I know which ones they are not. Ones at which the clientele would take one look and dismiss the sobrasada as "foreign". It wouldn't go down too well as it doesn't lend itself to being covered in HP or dipped into a cold and congealing egg yolk. Whichever these 40 hotels might be however, is the fact that they are offering sausage really worthy of news? Weirdly, it is.

The sobrasada cannot disguise its essential and simple sausageness. It is, regardless of its authenticity, geographical stamp and paprika, a basic food. It is fundamental, to a Mallorcan culinary tradition, but its basic nature is one that it shares with other local specialities, about which a ballyhoo is made above their station in the gastronomic food chain. Bread and oil, for example. As with pa amb oli, sobrasada can be tasty, tasty, very, very tasty, but it's not unique in being tasty. Sausage sarny, anyone?


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.