A sausage roll is a length of seasoned sausagemeat wrapped in puff pastry and baked until the pastry is golden and shatters when bitten. It is sold hot in every bakery in Britain and cold at every buffet, and it is the country’s most reliable savoury snack.
What makes a good one
Three things, and cheap versions fail on all of them:
- The pastry — genuine puff, laminated so it separates into visible layers and flakes messily down your front. Shortcrust is a different and lesser product.
- The meat — properly seasoned pork with a decent meat content, sage and white pepper. Cheap rolls use a high proportion of rusk and fat and taste of neither.
- The ratio — enough pastry to hold together, not so much that it is a bread product.
The traditional accompaniment is brown sauce or English mustard, and a good many people eat them with nothing at all, standing up, from a paper bag.
Greggs
Greggs is the dominant seller by an enormous margin, moving well over a hundred million a year from the hot cabinet by the door. Its sausage roll is the benchmark against which British people judge all others, whatever they may say about artisan bakeries.
The vegan row
In January 2019 Greggs launched a vegan sausage roll using Quorn. The broadcaster Piers Morgan attacked it publicly, Greggs replied with a single sardonic tweet, and the row ran across national media for days.
The product sold out repeatedly, sales rose sharply, and the share price reached a record high. It is now taught as a case study in handling manufactured outrage, and the vegan version remains a permanent line.
The party version
Cocktail sausage rolls — small, cold, from a supermarket packet — are a fixed component of the British buffet, alongside cocktail sausages, crisps, vol-au-vents and a quiche nobody asked for.
They also appear, without fail, at British funerals. The post-funeral spread — sandwiches, sausage rolls, tea, and a great deal of cake — is a genuine institution, and the sausage roll is its centrepiece.
The relatives
- Cornish pasty — the crimped, protected West Country original.
- Pork pie — hot water crust, cold seasoned pork and a layer of jelly. Melton Mowbray pies have protected status.
- Scotch egg — a boiled egg in sausagemeat and breadcrumbs.
- Steak bake, cheese and onion pasty, and the chicken bake — the rest of the Greggs hot cabinet, each with its own partisans.
The substantial meal
During the pandemic, a government minister was asked whether a Scotch egg counted as a “substantial meal” for the purposes of pub restrictions, and answered that it probably did. The resulting week of national argument about the meal status of bar snacks is remembered with real affection, and sausage rolls featured heavily in it.