THERE’S A sign on a small shop in Sussex that reads, “If you want foreign food, go abroad”. It sums up the robust intention of Bill O’Hagan to promote the humble sausage to its full culinary position and has won Bill the accolade of being winner of Britain’s “Best Sausage Maker”.
I’ve tasted Bill’s delicious sausages before in the hard to find ‘Pub with No Name’, which for the record is just outside Froxfield in Hampshire.
They are famous for having “no artificial anything” and they mean what they say: high quality meat, no colourings, preservatives, trimmings, additives, not even the usual rusk or bread – just some wholesome oats.
But I had never met the man himself until last Wednesday at the Queen’s Birthday Party in the grounds of the British Embassy in Athens. On a swelteringly humid night, I saw a dapper and rotund figure with a slightly florid face standing behind a stall in the corner. He was cheerfully attired in a red and white striped apron and straw hat encouraging people to roll up and try his latest invention.
With the bravura of a sideshow medicine man, he was offering slices of his latest taste and challenging them to identify it. “Pork and beetroot,” he declared proudly for the assembled, if somewhat bemused, Greeks.
If he had been able to bring them on his easyJet flight in his cool box, the guests might also have been able to sample some of the other 150-odd recipes that he conjures up with gleeful enthusiasm from his ‘Drunken Duck’ marinated in brandy to his ‘Roobanger’ made of kangaroo meat and sherry. Alcohol, it seems, is the best preservative.
The ex-Fleet Street hack (38 years on the Telegraph) has returned to meat, his first love from South Africa where he was a butcher’s boy and transformed a passion to make the perfect sausage into a business. But it has not been without its problems; the BBC documentary ‘Blood on the Carpet’ showed how supermarkets used unscrupulous techniques to steal some of his methods and recipes.
He remains undeterred, the famous chef Albert Roux has said that he “created the revival of the sausage”, which may well be true, for it seems it has ancient roots. When I mentioned to the Greek man next me, who had come back for his third helping, that the British could produce some good food, he quickly put me in my place and told me the sausage was a Greek invention, and didn’t I know that the playwright Epicharmus around 500BC wrote a comedy titled The Sausage.
“Ah,” I say, flummoxed again by the fact that apparently the Greeks have invented everything. “I bet it wasn’t as thick and delicious as O’Hagan’s pork’ – and you know they have natural skins, you don’t have to prick them,” at which point I realised by the worried look on his face that if I am not careful we could be in yet again for a cross-cultural misunderstanding.
