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For thousands of years, people have taken some of an animal’s least desirable parts and turned them into a culinary tradition found almost everywhere on Earth.
The basic idea is remarkably simple, but different cultures turned it into thousands of distinct foods shaped by climate, religion, preservation, and local taste.
It can be dried, smoked, fermented, or cooked fresh.
Learn more about how the sausage is made in this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Sausage is one of humanity’s oldest processed foods. It almost certainly did not have a single inventor. Instead, sausage making seems to have developed wherever people slaughtered animals and needed a practical way to use meat quickly, preserve it, and make tougher or less desirable portions more palatable.
At its most basic, a sausage is chopped or ground meat mixed with salt and seasonings, usually packed into a casing. From that simple idea came thousands of variations. Some sausages are meant to be eaten fresh. Others are cooked or smoked. Still others are fermented or dried and can last for months without refrigeration.
The exact origin of sausage making is impossible to establish because it predates written history. The technique probably emerged naturally from two discoveries. People learned that salt slowed meat spoilage, and they realized that cleaned animal intestines made convenient containers for chopped meat.
Sausage solved several important problems for early people. In addition to preserving and storing meat, sausage also let people use every part of the animal. Any extra bits could be put into a sausage, ensuring nothing went to waste. This was extremely important in a world where calories were scarce.
Some claims suggest sausage-making existed in Mesopotamia by the fourth millennium BC, although evidence for such precise dates is uncertain. Babylonian tablets from the second millennium BC describe meat preparations that resemble stuffed or processed meats. Early historical records from China document an ancient form of sausage in the 6th century BC.
Homer’s Odyssey contains references to sausage-like food, and other Greek writers also mention sausages. So, sausage making was well established in the Greek world long before the rise of Rome.
The Romans became enthusiastic sausage makers. They produced several varieties using pork, organs, and other parts of animals. Some were fresh, while others were smoked or preserved.
The Roman cookbook traditionally associated with Apicius contains recipes for seasoned stuffed meat products. Roman sausage makers had already developed many of the principles that remain familiar today. Meat was chopped, seasoned, and packed into cleaned intestine.
Sausage could also be an inexpensive food. Romans could turn trimmings and organ meat into something flavorful and portable. This helped sausage become popular for both rich and poor alike.
As Rome expanded, Roman culinary traditions spread through Europe. Local populations combined these techniques with their own animals and seasonings. Over time, sausage making became intensely regional.
The enormous number of European sausages is partly due to geography.
Before refrigeration, climate shaped how meat could be preserved. In cool northern regions, sausages could remain fresh longer during winter. Smoking became especially important in areas with abundant forests and fireplaces.
In warmer parts of Europe, drying and fermentation became more important. Salt reduced available moisture, while beneficial microorganisms produced acids that discouraged dangerous bacteria. A sausage could gradually become firm enough to survive for months.
Local agriculture mattered as well. Pig-raising regions naturally developed pork sausages. Pastoral areas often produced lamb or beef sausages.
Spices also became geographical signatures. Garlic became important in many Mediterranean sausages. Black pepper became associated with several Italian varieties. Paprika transformed the sausages of Spain and Hungary after peppers arrived from the Americas.
The result was that sausages began functioning almost like culinary maps.
One other popular sausage type which is still popular in many parts of the world is blood sausage. The blood of an animal was difficult to store and preserve, yet had many calories and nutrients. Blood sausage was one of the best methods of preservation. Today, black pudding in England and blutwurst and Germany continue this tradition.
While Europe became known for sausages, they were not unique to Europe.
Asia’s sausage history is far older and more diverse than is sometimes assumed. Sausage making did not simply arrive there from Europe.
China in particular has an ancient tradition of preserved ground and chopped meats. Chinese-style fermented sausages have been produced for thousands of years.
The best-known family is lap cheong. The term is often translated as Chinese sausage, although it describes a broad family rather than one standardized recipe.
The classic Cantonese version is usually made from pork and fat. It is salted, sweetened, seasoned, stuffed into narrow casings, and dried.
Unlike many European sausages, lap cheong is often noticeably sweet. Drying rather than heavy smoking is usually the primary preservation technique.
Korea similarly had meat preparations that involved stuffing intestines, although they developed differently from European sausages. The best example is soondae.
Korean sundae is traditionally made by stuffing pig intestine with a mixture that can include blood, noodles, or grains. It is therefore more closely related to the world’s blood-sausage traditions than to something like a bratwurst.
Southeast Asia developed some of the world’s most interesting fermented sausages.
Thailand has sai krok Isan, associated with the northeastern region known as Isan. Pork is mixed with cooked rice and seasonings before being stuffed into casings.
The rice is important because it provides carbohydrates for lactic acid bacteria. As the sausage sits, fermentation generates acidity and produces its characteristic sour flavor.
Among the pastoral peoples of Central Asia, sausage developed around horses as well as sheep and cattle.
One of the most distinctive products is kazy.
It is particularly associated with Kazakhstan and neighboring Turkic cultures. Qazi traditionally consists of horse meat and fat stuffed into intestines. It can then be boiled, dried, or sometimes smoked.
That makes qazi fundamentally different from the pork-based sausages that dominate much of Europe. Its ingredients reflect the horse-centered culture of the Eurasian steppe.
North Africa has the continent’s oldest and most extensive sausage traditions. Sheep, goats, and cattle were domesticated in northeastern Africa thousands of years ago, with livestock present in Egypt by at least the sixth millennium BC. This created the conditions for processed-meat traditions very early, although we cannot identify a particular ancient Egyptian product as the direct ancestor of a modern sausage.
The development of North African sausage was strongly influenced by the Islamic conquest beginning in the seventh century. Pork largely disappeared from Muslim food traditions, so sausages were normally made from lamb or beef.
While sausages were widespread across Eurasia, they didn’t catch on everywhere.
South of the Sahara, sausage traditions are generally less prominent historically than dried, smoked, or roasted whole pieces of meat. There are several reasons for this. In tropical climates, stuffing moist ground meat into intestines can accelerate spoilage unless the sausage is immediately cooked or aggressively preserved.
Pre-Columbian Americans certainly made preserved and processed meat products, and there are scattered reports of meat being packed into animal skins or intestines, but there is no strong evidence that cased sausage was a widespread or important culinary tradition in the Americas before European contact.
During the medieval period, slaughtering pigs became an important seasonal activity throughout Europe. Animals were frequently killed in late autumn or early winter, when colder temperatures helped prevent spoilage.
The most desirable cuts might be salted or roasted. Other meat went into sausages. Fat was valuable rather than something to avoid because it provided calories and improved texture.
Sausage making became associated with professional butchers in growing European towns. Butcher guilds developed rules governing production, ingredients, and commerce. Individual cities gradually became famous for particular sausages.
This explains why so many sausage names are geographical. Frankfurt gave its name to the frankfurter. Bologna became associated with mortadella. Vienna eventually became connected with the wiener. The German name for Vienna is Wien.
Regional competition also encouraged specialization. A sausage was no longer simply preserved meat. It became a source of civic pride.
There are literally hundreds of types of sausages, and it would be impossible to cover them all individually, but you can categorize sausages into several broad categories.
Fresh sausages are raw and must be cooked before eating. Examples include bratwurst, Italian sausage, and many breakfast sausages.
Cooked sausages are heat-treated during production and are often ready to eat. Examples include mortadella, liverwurst, and many types of bologna.
Dried sausages are preserved by removing moisture, often over several weeks or months. Examples include salami and Spanish chorizo.
Smoked sausages are exposed to wood smoke for flavor and preservation. Examples include Polish kielbasa and French andouille.
Fermented sausages use beneficial bacteria to produce acid, which helps preserve the meat and gives it a tangy flavor. Examples include Genoa salami, and summer sausage.
Modern sausages are mostly the same as traditional ones with a few major innovations. One is the introduction of artificial casings such as collagen or cellulose. Some industrial sausages are produced in plastic casings that are removed before sale.
Industrial equipment also allowed meat to be chopped far more finely than traditional hand techniques permitted. This led to the widespread production of emulsified or finely ground sausages. Frankfurters and many forms of bologna belong to this category.
You might have noticed that I haven’t mentioned one type of sausage yet: the good ol’ American hot dog.
You might have wondered: what exactly is the difference between a hot dog, a wiener, and a frankfurter?
For all practical purposes, they are all synonymous today and mean the exact same thing. However, their origins are slightly different.
As I mentioned, Frankfurters originated in Frankfurt, and Wieners originated in Vienna. Traditionally, a Frankfurt sausage was a thin, finely ground pork sausage that was smoked and cooked. The classic Viennese sausage, Wiener Würstchen, was traditionally made from a mixture of pork and beef.
German immigrants brought sausages to the United States in large numbers during the nineteenth century. Long, thin sausages were sometimes jokingly called “dachshund sausages” because their shape resembled the long-bodied German dog.
By the late nineteenth century, “dog” had also become slang for sausage. Part of the joke came from recurring suspicions that cheap sausages might contain dog meat. Whether that accusation was ever widespread in reality mattered less than the fact that people joked about it.
The phrase “hot dog” was in print by the 1890s. One of the earliest known American examples appears in college slang from that decade, where “hot dog” referred to a hot sausage.
A hot dog is really the American serving style and, by only extension, the sausage itself. It usually means a frankfurter or wiener served in a split bun. Over time, Americans began using “hot dog” for both the bun and the sausage inside it.
There is a famous story that New York cartoonist T. A. Dorgan coined the term after seeing vendors selling “dachshund sausages” at a baseball game and, unable to spell “dachshund,” labeled them “hot dogs.” It is a great story, but it is almost certainly false. The term had already appeared in print before the supposed cartoon, and no copy of that cartoon has ever been found.
Sausages began as a practical solution to a basic problem: how to use as much of an animal as possible and preserve meat before it spoiled. Over thousands of years, that simple idea spread, evolved, and adapted to local climates, religions, ingredients, and tastes. The result is an extraordinary variety of foods.