Mariner's Quasi-Csabai

I was 13 years old when John Kennedy faced down Nikita Khrushchev, during the Cuban Missle Crisis, and I lived about 12 miles north of the Florida State Line. For my entire life, up to that point, Emergency Preparedness - or as we called it then, Civil Defense - was a significant focus in the lives and education of school children in the American South, and those conditions shaped the minds and spirits of an entire generation of Southern children. We expected "The Bomb" to arrive any day, bringing with it TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it); and the fact of Soviet imperialism simply reinforced those expectations.

When you are faced with TEOTWAWKI, you have only a few tried and true possible reactions:

• You can panic, like the old rhyme exhorts - "when in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!" - and most likely you, and any other people for whom you are responsible, will likely end up very dead, very quickly; or
• You can ignore the whole thing, stick your head in the sand, and hope it goes away (with the same probable outcome); or
• You can be a good Boy (or Girl) Scout, and try to prepare for the worst!  This would be my choice, although when I was of the correct age, I could never actually afford to join the Scouts.

Today, one of the worst conceivable outcomes of TEOTWAWKI, is interruption of global shipping.

"Why would shipping be so important", you might ask? Well, it's because we as a nation, as well as many other so-called "first world" nations, depend to a dangerous degree upon foreign imports for many of the comforts of our civilization, but most specifically, our food supply. If international transportation fails, those food supplies are also going to fail.

On a lighter note, these observations are important to this blog because one category of food supplies in particular would quickly become unavailable (or at least, unreliable): imported herbs and spices! Take black pepper (piper nigrum), for instance.  88% of the world's commercial supply of black pepper is grown in countries that are separated from the United States by really big oceans. About 9.5% is grown in Brazil, which might as well also be separated from us by the ocean, and a negligible amount is grown in Mexico and other Latin American countries. No significant quantity is grown in any of the United States!

"So," you might say, "if the world transportation network collapses, we don't have black pepper.  So what?  We could live without it."

True, but think about all of the things we use black pepper for, besides sprinkling it on our fried eggs: sausage, for instance. A search through the Internet will reveal very few recipes for sausage that don't have black pepper as an important ingredient! Thus we come to the crux of this blog: I decided that creating a sausage that didn't use black pepper would, in its own small way, help salve my fears of world collapse.

After spending many minutes searching the web for a  sausage recipe that doesn't call for black pepper, the only one I found was Hungarian Csabai.

The recipe has one main problem: the foodie who posted it maintains that only real Hungarian spices are permissible in the sausage.  Well, anyone who reads this blog for long knows that I'm not a food snob, and I don't buy it; and Hungary is a heck of a long way off, and across an ocean to boot! I'm also prone to substitute spices, if I don't happen to have the exact thing needed in a recipe, and it usually works out reasonably well. Besides, the only distinctively real Hungarian spices in the recipe are two types of paprika; and the readily-available Spanish-style paprika (along with a smidgen of cayenne) works just fine, thank you!

Anyway, after a little experimentation, I've come up with an acceptable recipe that I claim to be inspired by Hungarian Csabai. I call it my Quasi-Csabai...

Ingredients:

* equivalencies are approximate, due to rounding.

	metric*		US*
Pork Shoulder, ground	454	g	1	lb
Salt	4	g	¾	tsp
Garlic, granules	6	g	2	tsp
Paprika,powder (any style)	4	g	1¾	tsp
Cayenne, powder	1	g	¼	tsp
Caraway, ground	½	g		tsp
Sugar	1	g	¼	tsp

The original recipe also called for about ½ gram of Prague Cure #1, if the sausage was to be cased and smoked.

Directions:

If caraway is unavailable, you can substitute about half as much cardamom, anise, or cumin, and still get a reasonable facsimile.

If you are grinding your own meat, cut it into approximately 1 inch cubes.

Mix the meat (whether ground or not) and seasonings thoroughly, and place in a covered bowl. Chill overnight in the refrigerator.

Grind (or regrind) the meat mix with a ³⁄₁₆ inch plate, and mix well (again).  At this point you can package the meat mix for bulk storage, portion it out into patties, or stuff into hog casing.  In any case, the sausage should be refrigerated for two or three days before freezing, cooking, or smoking.

Observations:

I made a small batch of this yesterday, and since I was out of caraway, I used cardamom instead.  We had some with our breakfast this morning.  I thought it was pretty good.  My Honey says that it's a little to hot for her, though, so the next batch will likely use a bit less cayenne.

It isn't going to displace my signature breakfast sausage as my favorite, but it is entirely acceptable on its own, and in the event that black pepper becomes scarce, I'll still be able to make sausage!

Bon appetite!

Mariner