Sausage roll

Sausage roll

Type	Pastry
Course	Lunch / Snack
Main ingredients	Puff pastry, sausage
Cookbook: Sausage roll  Media: Sausage roll

A sausage roll is a British savoury pastry snack, popular in Commonwealth nations and beyond. They are sold at retail outlets and are also available from bakeries as a take-away food. A miniature version can be served as buffet or party food.

Composition

A Dutch sausage roll (saucijzenbroodje) showing the puff pastry surrounding the roll of minced meat inside.

The basic composition of a sausage roll is sheets of puff pastry formed into tubes around sausage meat and glazed with egg or milk before being baked.^[1] They can be served either hot or cold. In the 19th century, they were made using shortcrust pastry instead of puff pastry.^[2]

Sales

In the UK, the bakery chain Greggs sells around 2.5 million sausage rolls per week,^[3] or around 140 million per year.^[4]

History

The wrapping of meat or other foodstuffs into dough can be traced back to the Classical Greek or Roman eras. However sausage rolls in the modern sense of meat surrounded by rolled pastry, appear to have been conceived at the beginning of the 19th Century in France. From the beginning, use was made of flaky pastry, which in turn originated with the Hungarian croissant of the late 17th Century. Early versions of the roll with pork as a filler proved popular in London during the Napoleonic Wars and it became identified as an English foodstuff.

In popular culture

• The Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Grand Duke used sausage rolls as a plot device.^[5]
• The Blackadder series has several mention of sausage rolls. In the first series episode "Born to be King", the Queen is dreading the return of her husband because she feels as if she's "being used all night long, like the outside of a sausage roll". In the second series episode "Potato", Queen Elizabeth I's excitement at the return of Sir Walter Raleigh lends her an excuse to describe some of her "pretty wild dreams", one of which is her being a sausage roll.

See also

• List of sausage dishes
• Klobasnek
• Pasty
• Pigs in a blanket
• Pork pie
• Sausage bread

References

1. "Sausage Roll Recipe". Food Network. Retrieved 2009-10-28.
2. "Our New Cook-Book". Peterson's Magazine. 15: 438. July 1866. Retrieved 26 March 2012.
3. Kollewe, Julia (22 March 2012). "Budget 2012: Sausage roll VAT row turns unsavoury". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 March 2012.
4. Wallop, Harry (22 March 2012). "Budget 2012: Greggs sausage rolls to be hit". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 26 March 2012.
5. Arthur Sullivan; William Schwenck Gilbert; Ian C. Bradley (2001). The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan. Oxford University Press. pp. 1090–. ISBN 978-0-19-816710-5.

External links

• Sausage Roll recipe - taste.com.au