Sausages eat your liver.

So now we have to be told to cook sausages properly.

Sigh.

If anyone in my family cooks you sausages, they will be crispy on the outside and seriously hot in the middle. The idea of eating an undercooked sausage is appalling to us. Some cut the sausage in half lengthwise midway through cooking and cook the middle directly. Sometimes I do that too, especially if they are ‘cook from frozen’ ones.

If you have a piece of steak then it’s safe to eat it rare. Most of the time it’s safe to eat it raw, but rare is as far as I’ll go. Heat the surface, kill anything on the surface and there should be nothing inside unless the animal was diseased.

Take that same fine steak, mince it and make it into a sausage and I will cook it until the skin shatters. It is not safe rare.

Vegetarian sausages – same thing. They are not safe undercooked even though they have no meat in them.

Incidentally, don’t vegetarian sausages ‘normalise’ meat eating and turn veggies into carnivores? Do dildos turn gay women straight? Then why does electrofag normalise smoking? I think I now understand Twitter – I can bang one-liners on there halfway through a post. (end digression)

It’s not what the sausage is made of that’s the issue. It’s how it is made.

A steak is a chunk of cow chopped out as one slab of dead animal. The surface of that slab can get contaminated so you just have to cook the surface. In fact, you just have to get the surface above 80C and anything dangerous is dead. Unless the animal was infected, there is nothing to worry about inside the slab.

Any kind of mince results in the surface being mixed throughout the whole mess of stuff so anything that was on the surface can now be in the middle. The longer you store it, the more it grows.

It applies to veggie sausages too because that steak, when first cut, was uncontaminated. The bugs landed later and most likely came from the people involved in preparation. Make a sausage from fungus and soya and the contamination risk is exactly the same as if it was made of beef. Cook them right through.

Pork is a little different. Pigs get diseases we can also get, because they are linked to humanity via the intermediate species known as politicians. So pork should always be well cooked even if it’s a really big slab. Besides… crackling. You can’t get good crackling unless you incinerate the thing.

Chicken is very different. Salmonella isn’t so much a problem these days because the big producers use an oral vaccine delivered through drinking water. It wasn’t a problem in the old days because we used to cook it to the point where you could carve it with a sharp look, and Salmonella is only surface contamination.

Campylobacter, the one the news is shrieking about like it’s the new Ebola, is proving much harder to get rid of from flocks. It shows up when the chicks are three weeks old and nobody has yet worked out where the damn thing comes from. Probably bloody sparrows.There’s no vaccine yet. It gets into muscle tissue so it’s right through an infected chicken.

Fortunately it is extremely easy to kill. Just cook the chicken properly. Right through. Cut the skin on the legs so the legs can splay (if you have some kind of strange chicken fetish, keep it under control) so the heat gets into all parts. Every part, right through the centre, must get above 80 C to make sure. Basically, if you poke the skin with a fork and it shatters, you’re good to go.

Back to the pork sausages story.

If the Hepatitis E virus is in pork because the pig was infected then sausages are irrelevant. If it’s in the pig then it’s in pork chops and pork roasts and trotters and even in pig’s head brawn. I once made that in a jelly-mould shaped like a rabbit. A very cheap student food source, nutritious, tastes like crap. Better than tripe though. I think it was 80p for an entire pig’s head (about 1980) and the eyes stick to walls if you throw them. Lots of cheap food and entertainment too. I wonder if there are any students nowadays who could do it? Probably all too busy being Socialists who insist someone else do it for them.

I also tried cow brain. Also cheap, consistency like scrambled egg, not much taste but it did leave me with an urge to chew some grass and moo at people. They didn’t have the prion problem in those days. That only started when they reduced rendering temperatures to save cash… but that’s another story and would be a really big digression.

Concentrating on sausages and ‘processed pork products’ sounds like an agenda. But it’s the BBC! Surely they don’t have an agenda? Well no, you need a functioning thought process to have an agenda. The BBC push other people’s agendas as and when they are instructed by their Leftie overlords (the red ones or the blue/yellow ones, doesn’t make any difference any more).

Sausages are now deemed ‘unhealthy’ by people who have lived half as long as I have and have consumed nowhere near as much sausage meat, bacon, black pudding, Scotch eggs (not actually Scottish) or huge fat rinds off pork chops as I have and I am one of the over-fifties on no medication at all. It drives the NHS nuts. They will punish me soon with Williecam, narrated by David Attenborough.

“Here we are passing up the urethra. It’s not very far this time because the outside looks like an anorexic prune but – ah, here’s the bladder. Stained with peat and tobacco and lumpier than the bag of lumps we passed on the way here….’

They will keep going until they find something wrong with me so they can put me on the Stairway to Liverpool and stabilise their stats.

They will do that to every one of you too.

Sausage ads will soon be banned and sausage-sponsorship of sports will be denied. Football teams will not be allowed to have ‘Melton Mowbray Pork Pies’ on their shirts and all those ‘bacon’ Lolcats will be deleted.

I had to learn to make my own cigarettes. Now I will have to learn to make sausages.

Well, at least the ban brigade are increasing my skillset. A couple more years and I won’t need any outside help with anything at all.