Small Price, Big Flavors: Stewed Cabbage and Luganica (north Italian sausage) with Basmati Rice (or polenta, or ‘taters, or…)
Sausage. Sausage. And sausage.
….I wonder what came into your head when you read the word sausage, the first one in the series above. Maybe a sandwich with a lovely grilled link inside a warm, soft bun? Or was it a scent: that caramelized pork fat and spices dripping and, with a sound – you know, that sound, a hissizzlemmsiz before its drop into the bread, meat still warm, nose filled and piqued with and by all that flavor on the way? Or was it the juice, a dribble around your lips as your teeth slice through the lightly impregnated bun, the slightest crunch-pop accompanying that first commited bite, the whooshing mix as the compenents break down and blend in your mouth, the fast relay of expectation vs what’s actually there right now-then: is this a good sausage by compare, mediocre, poor or wow-great? Everyone likes sausage, even those who don’t.
But it’s a very loose term, ‘sausage’. By definition: ‘an item of food in the form of a cylindrical length of minced pork or other meat encased in a skin, typically sold raw to be grilled or fried before eating.’ (oxford english) A food that’s been around forever, basically, with each place having its own general way of creating a meaning, guidelines of what goes into the making, which parts of the pig, how much salt, which spices at what ration, etc. By the time we got to industrailization, (basically in the US,) whole categories with a bizillion variations often were slid into pseudo-categories like ‘Italian’ sausage, or Polish, or Hungarian, etc. Kind of a shame, really. In some places, each farm created, had and did its own recipes based on whatever appropriate ingreadients were at hand. More, each butcher or farmer take their experience and alter – maybe mister Franchi uses some fennel seed to his pork, maybe Rossini adds a bit of grappa while miss Dimitri makes the best Lamb sausage this side of…
Luganica is a term applied to a range of sausages made in the center-north of Italy, more so the Lombardia region. (Yeah, in case it sounds to you much like the ancient southern Italian region Lucania, you’re correct. That seems to be where the sausage originated, as mentioned in ancient Roman texts.) Usually, it has a bit of beef broth, wine and Grana cheese (a sort of Parmiggiano) mixed in, giving it a sort of long-meat-creamy-sweet-salt finish. It’s the primary flavor in a noted risotto, the ‘risotto a la monzese’, and a noted pasta, ‘pasta’, er, ‘monzese’. Or you can flavor a red sauce with it and pour it over spaghetti; it goes well of course in the oven with potatoes; mix it with a green like zucchini; and so on. Or, if you want a deep, rich flavor on a cool eve but dont feel much like cooking, you can shove this oh-so-easy-to-make classic on a back burner: