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

~AFFotD’s Research Staffers

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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