The sun is shining, the mercury’s touching double figures, it’s Friday, my bike just passed it’s MoT and I’ve got a saveloy. Does life get any better than this?
It’s traditional to visit the chippy on a Friday, even though, contrary to popular belief, Friday wasn’t called Friday because it’s the day for deep-fat frying. As anyone who’s currently reading a book about English history will tell you, it got its name from those marauding Norsemen who took it upon themselves to colonise England in the latter years of the first millennium AD. When they weren’t setting fire to things and using mild-mannered clerics for archery practice, they liked to unwind by thinking up names for the days of the week. In this case they named the day after their goddess Frigg, aka Freya (incidentally the only Norse goddess to make it into this blog two weeks running).
It’s a mysterious sausage, the saveloy. Certainly more of a southern delicacy than a northern one, it’s never sat comfortably among the gravy and mushy peas. Indeed, celebrated Macclesfield songsters the Macc Ladds once saw fit to sing of a visit to London, ‘No gravy at the chippy, and what’s a saveloy?’ So let’s shed a little light on this spicy assemblage of reconstituted pig meat.
The name ‘saveloy’ (and, therefore, presumably the sausage itself, since I can’t think of anything else that goes by the name saveloy) dates back to 1837, when someone took the French word ‘cervelas’ and mispronounced it. The French took cervelas from the Italian ‘cervellata’, a derivation of the Italian ‘cervello’, which owed its origin to the Latin ‘cerebrum’.
You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to see where this is going.
Yep, the original saveloy was made from pigs’ brains. Which makes you stop and think mid-chew, doesn’t it? Maybe it still is. Who knows? The ingredients are vague. Pork meat could mean anything, couldn’t it? The cannibals of New Guinea believed that when you eat someone else’s brain you acquire some of their intelligence. Come to think of it, I am quite messy and I can smell a truffle at fifty yards.
In trying to unearth some historical information about saveloys (why has no-one written a book on the subject?), the best I could find was this intriguing snippet on Wikipedia:
At the turn of the 20th century, the saveloy was described in an Australian court case as a “highly seasoned dry sausage originally made of brains, but now young pork, salted”.
I know what you’re thinking: what on earth was that court case about? I wish I could tell you but, alas, we can only speculate. Like so many things where saveloys are concerned, it was left hanging.
