Homemade Sausages

If you live in a cosmopolitan city or in any place with an ethnic population, you’ll have little problem finding an assortment of interesting sausages. But you can also make sausages yourself. The process is amazingly easy and limitlessly versatile. Most people are intimidated by making sausages because you have to order the casings from the butcher in advance, mail-order them (see Sources), or get them from a pork store— and not every town in America has a pork store.

Every region in France has its own sausages, but basically there are only two kinds: sausages made by stuffing chopped or puréed meat or seafood into a pig’s, lamb’s, or beef’s intestines, and patty sausages, what the French call crépinettes, from crépine, the word for caul fat. Crépinettes are what you make if you don’t have a sausage stuffer—you just shape the sausage meat into patties. You can then wrap the patties in caul fat so they hold their shape, but if you put a little egg in the filling, you don’t have to bother.