sausage king of north carolina

Sometimes when you aren't shopping for something it arrives in your life anyway. Early this fall Ian told me that he put in an order for twenty pounds of sausage with this fella he works with called ______ Bennett.

I'm not naming names because we also get moonshine from folks with whom Ian works and we recently learned that it is illegal to distill and give it away. We both thought you were allowed to distill and give away, or keep, as the case may be, a certain liquid measure of it each year. So who knows what kinds of heat could be brought down upon Mr. Bennett's uncle who makes his own sausage, but not in Tennessee. Mr. Bennett's uncle lives across the mountain in North Carolina. He makes sausage each year to sell to folks. It comes in regular and it comes in hot.

Ian likes it hot. So that's what we got. On the sixth of January Ian brought home two bags filled with sausage that we formed into patties. We rolled up sleeves and donned gloves because if you've never worked much with sausage or other fatty meats, well then you don't know how it cakes on to your hands and how soap won't loosen it a bit.

I form sausage patties in the same manner as I do a hamburger patty, but describing the technique... I've never tried. Ian made them a bit bigger than I would have, but surely that was to compensate for the shrinkage factor we faced once we fried up a few samples.

Mmmmmmmmmmmm. Good. But, they weren't as spicy as we hoped. In retrospect, we're glad we got hot because how bland could the regular be? Seemed a bit heavy-handed with the sage, but I'm not a sage-lover at all. Plus, it's likely that Mr. Bennett's uncle descended from the same bunch of North Carolina Bennetts as my grandmother.

Ian promised to give me Mr. Bennett's phone number so I can call and make inquires into the identity of his people. Then, too, I'd love to meet the uncle, hang out with him through the sausage-making process, and pepper him with questions.

Comments

[Nikki]

Hey there. I've been reading your blog for a few months now and I've missed you! I just started my own blog and I have to admit, you were a catalyst for my blogging aspirations. That being said, I'm tagging you. Take a look at my blog http://niksnacks.blogspot.com/2008/02/peu-dtiquette-little-tag.html to see what that means :)

[lla]

Lucky girl! We used to get a little tiny bit of homemade sausage for Christmas some years back - but that source, alas!, is gone. (although, how disappointing about the sage. I'm with you: a little goes a l-o-n-g way in my book...)