Insulted Banger

Belgian authorities at the Brussels Fair last week struck a blow against British pride and prestige that, at another time, might have brought a gunboat sailing up the Scheldt. The Belgian offense was to deny to the British pavilion at the fair the right to serve British sausages in the exhibit's "typical English pub." The reason: the sausages were not meat by Belgian standards.

Britons reeled. They regard their sausages, affectionately known as "bangers," with the veneration Frenchmen have for snails or Arabs for sheep's eyeballs. Every day Britons consume enough bangers to stretch from Lands End to the tip of Scotland, with enough left over to give one apiece to the men, women and children of the American state of Delaware, if they would eat them.

Jeweled Potatoes. After World War II the London Times drooled at the thought of getting back to the old-style banger: "Shall we still like it best when its skin has taken on a beautiful blackness, with a little pink bud peeping through the crack? Will it taste most distinctively divine at a long, lazy Sunday breakfast, or at luncheon while reposing, like a rare jewel on white velvet, on its cushion of mashed potatoes? If only we were still young enough to earn it by playing football!"

What many Britons preferred to avoid, until the Belgians tactlessly brought it up, is what their sausage is made of. It is supposed to be fresh pork, with some cereal and spices added, but how much of each and of what quality only the butchers really know. Under wartime controls and subsequent rulings, there have been vain attempts at regulation. The meat content has varied from 70% down to 25% (Belgians insist on 90% meat). The pork might be pork or maybe pulverized bone, cartilage and meat offal. Beef sausages are conceded to be mostly veal, but regulations have also permitted vegetable fat and dried milk to be counted as "meat." A music-hall gag found a comic regarding a banger and asking: "What should I put on this, marmalade or mustard?"

For Export Only. In desperation, the Ministry of Food once defined beef sausages as "sausages which are ordinarily known and sold as beef sausages." When he was Minister of Agriculture, the present Chancellor of the Exchequer Heathcoat Amory admitted before Parliament that "very deep passions are aroused by this subject" and added: "I find the sausage to be a much more complex entity than I had ever imagined." Law enforcement proved nearly impossible since any indicted butcher was always able to produce as witnesses a long string of lip-smacking, satisfied customers. "Do tell me, I am trying to find out," cried Lord Chief Justice Goddard in one case. "What is a sausage?" In despair of giving a proper definition, the Ministry of Food a month ago announced that it would set no standards at all for sausages.

At week's end, Britain proved resourceful enough to meet the challenge of the Belgians. British butchers were readying a new sausage with a 90% fresh pork content (dubbed by the London Daily Mirror "the British Banger, Mark II"), which would be rushed from the packing houses to the Brussels Fair. But doughty Britons at home need have no fear that they will be asked to give up their own beloved banger--plump, oily and filled with everything from fresh pork to scrag ends and scraps and minced meat offal. The 90% banger, Mark II, is for export only.

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