Category Archives: American Sausage Series

We talked about sausages, so if you want to be informed about encased meats and new and exciting penis jokes, this is where you’ll want to be.

American Sausage: Miscellaneous Sausages

I just can’t get over the fact that Cincinnati eats their sausages with grape jelly.”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief Johnny Roosevelt, after part 4 of this series

 grilled sausage

We’ve been talking a lot about sausages the past few weeks. Like, a lot.

There are dozens of types of sausage out there, even when you include the hundred or so varieties that haven’t made their way to America yet. In fact, we managed to find 25 different types of sausages that were either created in America, or were brought over from Germany (or other countries, but let’s be honest here, mostly Germany) and adopted by America as something that’s worth stuffing into your sin hole (that’s what we’ve been trying to call mouths this year. In retrospect it probably wasn’t our best idea).

Twenty sausage varieties have already been discussed, leaving us going into the homestretch to take all of the leftover sausages we had and “stuff” their “meat” into the “casing” of our final entry in this article series.

(Did you see what we did there, or were we too subtle? Subtle about the “this category is like the sausage of sausage varieties” thing?)

American Sausage Series Part 5: Miscellaneous Sausages

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American Sausage Series: Typical American Sausages

“Wait, we’re doing sausages enough?  But we’ve already done hot dogs!  And sandwiches!  When will the madness end?”

~AFFotD’s Research Staffers

sausage

About once a year, the staff of America Fun Fact of the Day decide they want to take on a really ambitious project.  Well, really, our editor-in-chief goes on a weird peyote trip and is like, “Man, what if we wrote about every kind of sandwich in America” or has the rest of us scour the internet for every goddamn regional hot dog or what have you, and when the boss man says, “Jump” we say, “Ugh, fine, can we have a few drinks first, at least?”  And now that we’re nice and entrenched in 2016, we apparently are overdue for our latest unnecessarily ambitious article series—sausages!  That’s right, we’re going to tell you about every fucking sausage, for the small, small price of “our sanity.”

Now, we are going to keep this list at least somewhat manageable by only sticking with sausages that were invented in America, or those that have a distinctive “American” version.  That means Italian Sausage, while invented in Italy (really!?  You don’t say!) still counts, because there’s an American variation of that sausage, but we can’t really go with chorizo, since the chorizo we eat tends to be either a Mexican or Spanish style.  It also, thankfully, means we don’t have to write about vegetarian sausage, as the Germans invented that in 1916, possibly as a continuation of the World War I chemical warfare research that brought us mustard gas.

Also unfortunately (or fortunately?) we can’t include Scrapple, which some people consider a sausage, but which is technically a nightmare pudding that mushes together pork offal with corneal and buckwheat and forms it into a loaf.  If we wanted to write an article of “America’s horrific attempts to mimic haggis” we might include Scrapple, but until then they don’t make the cut.  Basically, we stuck with encased meats of a very specific type.  We’re not going to go generic, so a specific kind of meat, in a sausage, on its own isn’t enough to make the list.  That’s right, chicken sausage, get right the fuck out of here.  Otherwise, we will follow these basic rules until our researchers get lazy and we don’t.  But strap yourself in, as the next few weeks you’ll get to learn way more about dick-shaped food than you’d have any reason to know in a thousand lifetimes.  Sausages!

American Sausage Series Part 1:  Typical American Sausages

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The Craziest Hot Dogs in Professional Baseball (Minor League Edition)

“You can’t get butts in the seat without a gimmick!”

~Bill Veeck

hot dog

As covered a few days ago, baseball and insane hot dogs go together like serial killers and women who send love letters to various prisons who have a lot of issues they need to work out.  We should tease out that comparison a little bit more, but we’re not going to.  Anyway, the point we think we’re trying to make is that, stadiums like to ply baseball fans with booze and food because while baseball can be boring, if you’re drunk and full, you won’t really mind.  This has led to a recent explosion in creative, intense, and, well, insane hot dogs throughout the baseball world.  And while we’ve talked about hot dogs in Major League Baseball stadiums already, that was really us going easy on the rest of you.  Because Minor League Baseball only sustains itself through the unfulfillable dreams of thousands of minimum wage athletes, and ridiculous ballpark gimmicks.  If you think of it, Minor League baseball has probably done it!  Smash a printer like in the movie Office Space!?  Sure!  Dress a dog as the bat boy?  Why not!  Live amputation on the field?  Jesus Christ, no, what the living hell is wrong with you!?

Anyway, if you thought that the last article we had about crazy hot dogs, well…no that was pretty crazy.  But check this shit out too!

The Craziest Hot Dogs in Professional Baseball (Minor League Edition)

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The Craziest Hot Dogs in Professional Baseball (Major League Edition)

“Take me out to the barf game, take me out to the puke!”

~Your obnoxious seven-year-old nephew who, you have to admit, probably has a bright parody career ahead of him

messy hot dog

America invented most of the world’s best sports.  Football?  That was us.  Basketball?  Sure, it was by a Canadian, but only because he was being paid by the Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA when he came up with it, because Canadian dollars were still printed on tree bark at the time, and we were responsible for all the changes that make it recognizable as a sport today.  Soccer?  Nice try, not a real sport, next question.

But of all the excuses for young men (and women!) to vent out the aggression of youth in a competitive and potentially humiliating environment that has been birthed within these borders, only one sport is iconic enough to be known as our national pastime.  No, not Mixed Martial Arts, that’s a terrible guess, are you high right now?  We’re talking about baseball of course.

You might view baseball as a relic of a simpler age, when men were men, owners were horrific bigots, and amphetamines were just, everywhere, all the time, which would explain why the sport struggles in some markets to maintain its relevancy.  It’s a slow-moving game trying to make its way in a fast-paced world, and say what you will about heart palpitations but taking the majority of the workforce off of Speed in the 80’s didn’t really do much for the pace of the game.  Major League Baseball teams try to combat the issues implicit with asking some 40,000 Americans to sit very still for three or four hours by making a day at the ball game a full entertainment and gastronomical experience.  This involves a gallons of watered down beer and, more recently, absurd, amazing American culinary disasterpieces for us to shove in our faces and slink into our chairs to ride out our food coma contently watching yet another 1-2-3 inning.

Sure, we could go on about crazy nachos served in miniature baseball hats, or giant cups of frozen sugar (okay, so maybe malt cups aren’t exactly a new development) but let’s be real here.  This is America’s sport, we’re going to need to talk about America’s food.  America’s best, most absurdly adaptable, most occasionally unnecessarily expensive food.  Let’s get to it.

The Craziest Hot Dogs in Professional Baseball (Major League Edition)

hot dogs everywhere Continue reading