Sausage

War without fire is like sausages without mustard ~ Juvénal des Ursins or Henry V

A sausage is a type of meat product usually made from ground meat—often pork, beef, or poultry—along with salt, spices and other flavourings. Other ingredients, such as grains or breadcrumbs may be included as fillers or extenders.

Quotes

• War without fire is worth nothing—like sausages without mustard.
  • Jean Juvénal des Ursins or Henry V

•   For the lank thighs, no thighs but skin,
  They are specked with spots like sausage-meat.
  • François Villon, "The Complaint of the Fair Armouress", translated by A. C. Swinburne
  • Poems and Ballads (second series) (1878)

• Grangousier was a good fellow in his time, and notable jester; he loved to drink neat, as much as any man that then was in the world, and would willingly eat salt meat. To this intent he was ordinarily well furnished with gammons of bacon, both of Westphalia, Mayence and Bayonne, with store of dried neat’s tongues, plenty of links, chitterlings and puddings in their season; together with salt beef and mustard, a good deal of hard roes of powdered mullet called botargos, great provision of sausages, not of Bolonia (for he feared the Lombard Boccone), but of Bigorre, Longaulnay, Brene, and Rouargue.
  • François Rabelais, Gargantua, translated by Urquhart and Motteux
    • Chapter 1.III.—How Gargantua was carried eleven months in his mother's belly

• The Chitterlings advanced so near that Pantagruel perceived that they stretched their arms and already began to charge their lances, which caused him to send Gymnast to know what they meant, and why they thus, without the least provocation, came to fall upon their old trusty friends, who had neither said nor done the least ill thing to them. Gymnast being advanced near their front, bowed very low, and said to them as loud as ever he could: We are friends, we are friends; all, all of us your friends, yours, and at your command; we are for Carnival, your old confederate. Some have since told me that he mistook, and said cavernal instead of carnival.
  Whatever it was, the word was no sooner out of his mouth but a huge little squab Sausage, starting out of the front of their main body, would have griped him by the collar. By the helmet of Mars, said Gymnast, I will swallow thee; but thou shalt only come in in chips and slices; for, big as thou art, thou couldst never come in whole. This spoke, he lugs out his trusty sword, Kiss-mine-arse (so he called it) with both his fists, and cut the Sausage in twain. Bless me, how fat the foul thief was! it puts me in mind of the huge bull of Berne, that was slain at Marignan when the drunken Swiss were so mauled there. Believe me, it had little less than four inches’ lard on its paunch.
  The Sausage’s job being done, a crowd of others flew upon Gymnast, and had most scurvily dragged him down when Pantagruel with his men came up to his relief. Then began the martial fray, higgledy-piggledy. Maul-chitterling did maul chitterlings; Cut-pudding did cut puddings; Pantagruel did break the Chitterlings at the knees; Friar John played at least in sight within his sow, viewing and observing all things; when the Pattipans that lay in ambuscade most furiously sallied out upon Pantagruel.
  Friar John, who lay snug all this while, by that time perceiving the rout and hurlyburly, set open the doors of his sow and sallied out with his merry Greeks, some of them armed with iron spits, others with andirons, racks, fire-shovels, frying-pans, kettles, grid-irons, oven forks, tongs, dripping pans, brooms, iron pots, mortars, pestles, all in battle array, like so many housebreakers, hallooing and roaring out all together most frightfully, Nabuzardan, Nabuzardan, Nabuzardan. Thus shouting and hooting they fought like dragons, and charged through the Pattipans and Sausages. The Chitterlings perceiving this fresh reinforcement, and that the others would be too hard for ‘em, betook themselves to their heels, scampering off with full speed, as if the devil had come for them. Friar John, with an iron crow, knocked them down as fast as hops; his men, too, were not sparing on their side. Oh, what a woeful sight it was! the field was all over strewed with heaps of dead or wounded Chitterlings; and history relates that had not heaven had a hand in it, the Chitterling tribe had been totally routed out of the world by the culinary champions. But there happened a wonderful thing, you may believe as little or as much of it as you please.
  From the north flew towards us a huge, fat, thick, grizzly swine, with long and large wings, like those of a windmill; its plumes red crimson, like those of a phenicoptere (which in Languedoc they call flaman); its eyes were red, and flaming like a carbuncle; its ears green, like a Prasin emerald; its teeth like a topaz; its tail long and black, like jet; its feet white, diaphanous and transparent like a diamond, somewhat broad, and of the splay kind, like those of geese, and as Queen Dick’s used to be at Toulouse in the days of yore. About its neck it wore a gold collar, round which were some Ionian characters, whereof I could pick out but two words, ΎΚΣ ἈΘΗΝΑΝ, hog-teaching Minerva.
  The sky was clear before; but at that monster’s appearance it changed so mightily for the worse that we were all amazed at it. As soon as the Chitterlings perceived the flying hog, down they all threw their weapons and fell on their knees, lifting up their hands joined together, without speaking one word, in a posture of adoration. Friar John and his party kept on mincing, felling, braining, mangling, and spitting the Chitterlings like mad; but Pantagruel sounded a retreat, and all hostility ceased.
  The monster having several times hovered backwards and forwards between the two armies, with a tail-shot voided above twenty-seven butts of mustard on the ground; then flew away through the air, crying all the while, Carnival, Carnival, Carnival.
  • François Rabelais, Pantagruel, translated by Urquhart and Motteux
    • Chapter 4.XLI.—How Pantagruel broke the Chitterlings at the knees

• There he got out the luncheon-basket and packed a simple meal, in which, remembering the stranger’s origin and preferences, he took care to include a yard of long French bread, a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask wherein lay bottled sunshine shed and garnered on far Southern slopes.
  • Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908), Chapter IX. Wayfarers All

• It didn’t matter that you could hear his sweat spitting into his grumbling cauldrons and snapping skillets, his strange, almost sexual groans as he tossed the worms in the slithering grease, the nasty snarls of the dog who refused to move from her place by the stove and was covered in tiny burn marks. Obviously she considered any discomfort worth the chance to chase a random sliver of sausage through the air before it could reach the straw-strewn floor. The dog was as much addicted to the stuff as anyone else.
• That moment when you first slice through the thin, crisp skin and watch the dark, meaty oatmeal erupt from the gleaming black tube is a moment of worship. You could divine the future in those entrails.
  • On blood sausage. Michael Moorcock, King of the City (2000), Chapter 20. The Skin