Sausage in the tundra

As with the great American humourist Mark Twain, reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. The ass-end of the donkey is alive and well and on location in the great city of Edmonton, Canada. I have been undercover in this city for one reason and one reason alone. To procure and consume the greatest sausage ever made by man. I have made the trip in great secrecy, (daring not to even alert the famously loose-lipped other half of the donkey, Kinger), so as to avoid the inevidable throngs of media that plague my every move.

Sausage hunt in lovely Edmonton

I, like anyone with a serious meat tooth, have a deep and profound love of the sausage. And while I do enjoy tossing a few hotdogs down the proverbial hallway, the 'sausage party' is in fact my favorite form of social get-together. Just the other week, I picked up a few extra pricy links of Italian and German sausage to be enjoyed at the home of meat-loving percussionist, Pete Holmes. Where better to enjoy a few fat sausages than over at the 'man-shan', I thought. I passed the links off to Holmes and he cooked them to perfection--half blackened on the outside but still juicy on the inside. My first few bites were rewarding, but as I continued to stuff my face with sausage after sausage, I began to realize something amiss with these particular species of links. The spice was good, if unremarkable; the casing broke with a satisfying crack; the flavourful juices trickled down my chin; so what exactly was the problem? Finally, the great gynalcohologist Wade Davis alerted me to the problem: the texture. The meat was ground too finely, the tooth passed through the meat with little to no resistance. There was simply nothing to chew. Much like a standard, fleshless blood sausage (or a bowl of jello), this textural impotence left me feeling like I was eating food more fit for a nursery or an assisted care center, than a manly man-shan barbecue. So as you can see, the production of the perfect sausage is a complex affair. It involves selecting the right cuts of meat; adding the perfect percentage of fat; finding the ideal chemistry of spice; choosing the right girth of casing; and just as importantly, grinding the meat to the correct degree of fineness.

Wade Davis with friends at the man-shan sausage party

I have enjoyed many an exquisite sausage in my life. In Sao Paulo, I slid back six or so spicy numbers as part of a churasco mixto. I squeezed lime juice on these babies and enjoyed them with a large bowl of fresh arugula. In Winnipeg, I was treated by  the famed architessa Suzy Melo to an obscenely large and mottled homemade Portugese blood sausage prepared by her mother. It was heavy with garlic and contained chunks of pork meat to satisfy the tooth and jaw. I have feasted on various sublime German wursts, English bangers and Italian salsiccias. But all of these variations of the sausage pale beside the smokey satisfaction of a good kolbasa. The kolbasa comes in two varieties, Polish and Ukrainian. The Ukrainian kolbasa--also spelled 'kovbasa' and 'kobasa'--is made from quality smoked ham and predominantly spiced with salt and garlic. It can be eaten cold and emanates an enticing shade of pink. The Polish variety is a uniform grey colour, it requires cooking and generally contains a larger amount of black pepper.

By far the finest kolbasa I have eaten in my life is made by Marchyshyn's Home Meat Market in Edmonton. To get an idea of how dear this sausage is to me, the word 'Marchyshyn' was one of the first I ever spoke. Before the age of two, I would demand of my parents "more Marchyshyn!" My mother would find rings of the stuff hidden under my bed for safe keeping. I have not lived in Edmonton for more than twenty years and I have never missed much about the city. But when my friends in Taiwan sometimes see me staring off into the distance with the hint of a tear at the corner of my eye, they know what I am thinking about.

Marchyshyn's Kolbasa

So what makes Marchyshyn's kolbasa so superior to all other varieties? I have pondered this question for many years. After the textural disapointment of the recent links at the man-shan, I realized that texture was key. The Marchyshyn sausage is coarsely ground, you feel the girth of the ham as you bite in. But the art of sausage making is not simply a matter of grinding the meat coarsely. One must begin with meat of the highest quality. I'm sure you can imagine the disaster of taking a bowl of lips and assholes and grinding them coarsely. All would be revealed. Thus in a certain sense, one can say the beauty of the Marchyshyn kolbasa lies with its honesty. By starting with quality meat, and hilighting this quality through the coarseness of the grind, we are not simply given a quality sausage, we are given truth itself, embodied in the form of a sausage. Let us now ponder Aristotle's realm of the ideal, where the essense of all things lives in eternity. Here there exists not only a perfect triangle, square, and circle, but also one perfect ring of Marchyshyn kolbasa.