Who first thought of grinding up all those little unused odds and sods from an animal carcass and stuffing them into a bit of intestine? Many people, apparently. Sausages are one of those products which, while seemingly not intuitive, emerged independently all around the world thousands of years ago.

As far as we can tell, sausages have been produced since we began butchering animals. The first record of sausage-making is from around 2,000 bc: an Akkadian cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia mentions intestines filled with forcemeat. Sausages feature in The Odyssey as a simile for Odysseus tossing and turning in bed (‘When a man besides a great fire has filled a sausage with fat and blood and turns it this way and that and is very eager to get it quickly roasted’). And in Aristophanes’s co

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