In honour of British Sausage Week (5th – 11th Nov), Battlesteads Hotel and Restaurant in Wark, near Hexham, has expanded its menu and is offering customers The Great Battlesteads Banger – a specially created recipe of leek, real lager and pork.

The team at Battlesteads set a challenge to Wark-based Northumberland Sausage Company to create ‘The Great Battlesteads Banger’ by providing home-grown leeks from the hotel’s kitchen garden, together with a supply of new cask conditioned Adder Lager from Allendale Brewery. Claire Watson-Laney of The Northumberland Sausage Company is well versed in developing surprising sausage flavours, such as barbecued mealworms and llama and lavender; making the Battlesteads banger relatively straight-forward by comparison!

Claire and her butchers used their speciality sausage-making skills to perfect the balance of leek and real lager together with their own secret seasoning for the new sausage. The Great Battlesteads Banger will be served nestled on a bed of bubble and squeak with steamed kale from our gardens and could be washed down with a pint of Adder Lager – a perfect celebration of the great British sausage.

Battlesteads owner Richard Slade said: “The Great Battlesteads Banger is already proving popular in pre-tasting sessions; the balance of leek, real lager and pork is just right – and because all the produce was grown and sourced locally, it tastes even better! Battlesteads is renowned for its locally-sourced produce and, with our two onsite polytunnels, it’s easy for us to offer plentiful fresh, seasonal vegetables all year round.”

Battlesteads will be serving up the leek and real lager banger on the specials menu priced at £8.95 as part of British Sausage Week.

Sausage Statistics

• During the year to July 2012 the UK ate 196,152 tonnes of sausages, spending £707 million. The banger is the nation’s favourite meat‐based dinner.
• The most popular flavour of sausage is the plain pork sausage, which accounts for 43 per cent of sales, followed by Irish (17 per cent) and Cumberland (13 per cent).
• Sausages were nicknamed bangers during the Second World War.  Their high water content due to the scarcity of other ingredients meant that they were liable to explode when cooked as the water turned to steam.
• Sausages are even older than ancient Greece or Rome ‐ the Sumerians (modern day Iraq) made sausages 5,000 years ago.
• It is believed that sausages were brought to Britain by the Romans some time before 400 AD. Since then various English counties have each had their own way of flavouring their local sausage – e.g. Lincolnshire flavours with fresh sage and Cheshire uses Caraway and Coriander.
• The British sausage even has its own fan club, the British Sausage Appreciation Society.  The Society has over 5,000 members in the UK and the highlight of the society’s year is British Sausage Week.

Source: www.lovepork.co.uk