Because who doesn't love a banger?

Sausages are a global food. From Asia to America, Europe to Africa, you can find sausages in one form or another. In their honour, we explore 14 historic facts about the unbeatable banger.

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1.

Egyptians have been making (and eating) a type of sausage called Mombar Mahshy, for (some say) 5,000 years, with remnants reportedly found in ancient Egyptian tombs. It’s made by stuffing cow intestine with beef, lamb, rice, cardamom and mastic (a type of resinous gum).

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2.

Sausages were produced at least 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), where ancient Sumerians stuffed meat into intestinal casings to create what may be some of the world’s earliest sausages.

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3.

The ancient Greeks and Romans were also partial to a sausage or two, with Homer, Epicharmus, and Aristophanes all mentioning them in their writing. Greek and Roman tastes differed slightly, with the former preferring fresh sausage, and the latter smoked.

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4.

The most famous sausage in the ancient world was produced in Lucania, Italy (modern day Basilicata) and was aptly named, lucanica. This sausage was smoked and spiced with ingredients such as bay, cumin, parsley, and pepper, while a salty flavour was achieved with the addition of liquamen (fish sauce).

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5.

Sausages, popular in the Roman Empire, were threatened with the conversion to Christianity. Many sausages contained blood, which the Bible forbid people from eating, and there was also the association of sausages with pagan phallic rites and festivals. But it seemed people liked them so much that a black market sprung up to give them their fill.

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6.

In the Middle Ages, diets (of the wealthy, at least) often reflected the medical beliefs of the time. Physicians followed the writings of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), the 10th century Persian writer, meaning European food at the time developed a distinctly Middle Eastern flavour. This led to sausages being highly seasoned with spices, a characteristic that remains in many sausages today.

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7.

Roasted sausages were very popular across northern Europe during the Middle Ages and on special occasions enormous versions were presented to the public. In the city of Königsberg in the Duchy of Prussia (modern day Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1601, butchers reportedly made a gigantic sausage from 81 hams for New Year’s Day.

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8.

During the Portuguese Inquisition, Jews were often identified because they didn’t hang pork sausages in the local smokehouses. To combat this, Jews created alheira, sausages made with game birds and garlic, ingeniously indistinguishable from their non-kosher cousins.

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9.

Kazy or kazi, is a traditional horse meat sausage of the Kazakhs, Tatars, and other Central Asian peoples. Kazakhs have eaten kazy and other horse meat dishes for centuries, with the sausage being so important that their Olympic weightlifting and wrestling teams brought them into the UK for the 2012 games. All that horsepower seemed to work, with the Kazakhs taking home 4 gold and three bronze medals.

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10.

Fish sausages - yes, a real thing - enjoyed a certain amount of popularity in Britain until around the end of the 19th century. They were commonly made with haddock, mackerel, and kipper, and would be bulked out with cereal, like a traditional British banger but way grosser.

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11.

The 500 year old Cumberland sausage was traditionally made from a breed of pig - the Cumberland - that went extinct in the 1960s. In 2008, with the help of some mad genius scientists and years of selective breeding, a sow was born with a 99.6% DNA match, raising hopes that the original sausage could be made once again. Sadly, the sow proved infertile and the true Cumberland remains just snout of reach.

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12.

In Taipei, Taiwan, ‘sausage gambling’ is a deep part of the culture. It finds its roots in WWII, when sellers of wild boar bangers would encourage Japanese and American troops to bet on dice for the chance to double their sausage haul.

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13.

Bangers, as in bangers and mash, is a term that originated in WWI when meat shortages led to an increase in the water content of sausages. When these sausages were cooked they would explode or bang, resulting in the name.

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14.

In 2015, drawings of German wartime boobytrap bombs, were rediscovered after 70 years. The drawings included an exploding chocolate bar, an incendiary bomb disguised as a Thermos flask and an army mess tin with a bomb hidden beneath some bangers and mash, bringing a more literal meaning to the beloved British dish.