When we eat at some of the better local barbecue temples around town, we take serious note of any sausage that has that old-school taste: The sensory buds activate, we perk up, and we smile. It's this great taste that is disappearing as the flavor of sausage gets dumbed down for the lowest common consumer. Casings turn from natural hog gut to synthetics. The fat content, and thus the flavor, diminishes. Once-superb sausage makers admit to your face that they have "changed their flavor profile" because "people these days just thought it was too spicy or too greasy" or "that it had too much garlic." Sew my ears shut; I've heard it all.
Our sausage heritage here in Central Texas is decidedly Czech and German, with a little Polish thrown in. Those settlers from Eastern Europe brought with them their butchery traditions, their lust for many different types of traditional sausage, and their meat preservation technology in the form of smoking-sheds and pit smokers.
Back in the day, before refrigeration and the growth of hamburger chains, butchers made sausage from what was leftover once the monied customers had bought all of the steaks, the roasts, and the stew cuts. Everything remaining was ground up with some pork fat, seasoned aggressively, stuffed into a section of hog intestine, and smoked or grilled – the perfect marriage of cow and pig. The sweet kiss of the smoky wood not only added to the flavor profile, but it preserved the meat so that it lasted for days. Machinery was simple, so the grind tended to be coarse. This, dear reader, was the sausage of past dreams, the holy matrimony of meats. Today, it's in a sad state of affairs, but all is not lost: There are still some sausage producers in Austin that do it the right way – that hang on to tradition and make it the way they always have.
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