5th - 9th November was National Sausage Week* but I, along with most of the country, was busy enjoying Bonfire Night (about the 5th) and honouring the fallen on Remembrance Sunday (this year it actually fell on 11.11). 

So now, only one week late, it's time to celebrate one of Britain's favourite foods.  As a nation we spent more than £707million on sausages last year and we've been eating them for a very long time.

Sausages were brought to Britain by the Romans in around 400AD so sausage eating predates by a very long way our national dishes of fish & chips and curry+.  The dates at which these dishes became popular is a whole other story.

To celebrate the humble sausage sandwich, here's a Yorkshire recipe for this often-thought-of-as-humble delicacy:

1. Cook the sausages (fried, grilled or oven cooked) the more cooked the better so far as I'm concerned
2. Split the sausage(s) in half lengthwise and lay on the bottom of a Yorkshire tea cake (also known as large roll/bap/cob) cut in half.
3. The top half should then be fried in the bacon fat until crisp and tasty.
4. Dip into reduced chopped tinned tomatoes
5. Carefully lay on the of the sausage.
6. Serve, perhaps with brown sauce.

Incidentally, I'd never even heard of a sausage sandwich 'til I worked for BBC Local Radio in the mid 1980s.  It's what kept the journalists going when they were busy on a 'story'.

Other good ways to eat sausages include:

• Sausage casserole with plenty of vegetables, beans, possibly with a scone mix on top, a cobbler-type of dish.  Here's a colourful version, complete with seasonal pumpkin.
• Toad in the Hole, with the best Yorkshire pudding batter recipe (On from our very own Delia: http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/cuisine/european/english/toad-in-the-hole-with-roasted-onion-gravy.html)

*http://www.lovepork.co.uk/blog/article/sausage-week-2012

From an article by Brian Turner, Chef

+ Fish & Chips and Curry House, rather surprisingly the curry house came first:

• Fish and chips is a popular take-away food that originated in the United Kingdom in 1858 or 1863. In 1860, the first fish and chip shop was opened in London by Jewish proprietor Joseph Malin.
• The first curry house was more like 1809, see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8370054.stm