Sausages

The love of the Greeks for sausages based on antiquity. The ancient Greeks were great lovers of sausages, a fact that is evidenced by the dozens of excerpts, from Homer to Aristophanes, who in the comedy of Horses imagines a successor of Pericles and Kimon a butcher, who presents himself selling hot sausages hung around the neck.

In Greece today, each place makes sausages in its own way.

At Thrace, sausages are dominated by the soutzouki horseshoe - due to its shape - made from beef, with plenty of cumin, spices, black pepper and eaten raw, as a tsipouro appetizer, but also fried saganaki with cheese or eggs. However, sausages are also prepared with pork, with a mixture of pork and beef or with leeks.

At Eastern Thrace, where there are pastures with cattle, sausages are made only with beef, some with leeks and others with garlic, cumin and boukovo. The most famous of these are the Didymoteicho sausages.

At Macedonia, sausages have a tendency towards spicy and combine pork and beef with leeks, sweet and hot paprika and black pepper. The protagonists are the Karamanlidika sausages (originating from the East), with their main ingredient the beef that is smoked in beech wood and the thin sausages of Tzoumagia. In Lake Kerkini we have the buffalo sausages from the water buffalo of the area.

At Thessaly, sausages also have leeks and thus acquire a sweeter taste. Typical is the sausage of Trikala, smoked from pork with the addition of leeks.

In Pelion, the meat that dominated the sausages is beef. The sausages of Stagiata have been known since the 18th century and for two centuries there was no house that did not live from sausage production, as the historian Giannis Kordatos mentions.

At Cyclades, the sausages are made exclusively with pork and spices, in Mykonos with thrombi, in Syros and Tinos with fennel seeds, in Andros they put anise and they are smoked.

At Peloponnese, the sausages have orange zest in them and are kept in the oil of the area.

At Crete, again, the taste of vinegar and sometimes cumin dominates.