Reports and Photos

At our April meeting Andy Ringrose, a butcher from Broughton Astley came to demonstrate the art of sausage making.  The evening started with a brief history of sausages, which have been around for over  two thousand years and were introduced into Britain by the Romans.  The British public get through 175,000 tons of sausages each year, that's a lot of sausages!  Andy showed us how the sausage making machine worked, in the right hands it can produce one and a half miles of sausages per hour.  With the more serious bit out of the way he then demonstrated how the meat, rusk or breadcrumbs, herbs and seasoning were gradually mixed together with enough water to prevent the sausage from being crumbly.  This was then put into the top of the machine and the skin attached to the nozzle, this could be the intestine from a pig or a lamb depending on whether a fat or thin sausage was required.  He then worked the machine until a long sausage appeared through the nozzle, he then proceeded to make this into links of sausages, making it look very easy, we later found out that if you haven't done it before it is quite difficult!  
While this was going on Andy's son was in the kitchen cooking some plain pork and some Lincolnshire sausages which we tried before deciding which we would like to make, I must say they were very moorish.  Following this we paired up and, armed with our bowl and bags containing the meat, seasonings etc we set to making our sausages.  As you can imagine there was much hilarity during this process especially during the actual shaping of the sausages in the machine.  By the end of the evening we all had 2lb of sausages, maybe not all the same thickness or length but very tasty. If Andy was expecting a sedate group of  what people think WI ladies are like, he was possibly surprised to find the WI does have a sense of humour as we had a really good evening with him, funny, informative and productive.