I’ve never made Glamorgan sausages before, and there’s a good argument for saying that I haven’t made them today either.  I walked down into Aberdovey, expecting the Bank Holiday Monday to be bedlam, but at 1045 it was surprisingly quiet, perhaps because the weather was unencouraging, but perhaps because a lot of people were driving back home after their holiday.  I had a look around the craft fair, which was in the marquee by the Information Centre, and then went to do some odds and ends of shopping.

My first port of call was the lovely Aberdovey Butcher where I bought a lamb steak for the stew that I was planning, and then went to collect what I needed for my Glamorgan Sausages.  Having sourced a leek earlier in the week, I walked with great confidence into the delicatessen, Coast Deli and Dining, on the corner of Copper Hill Street and Sea View Terrace, and stopped dead.  Disaster!  The cheese counter had gone!  No Caerphilly for the Glamorgan sausages, and no Perl Wen for me (but the lunches looked seriously wonderful, so I’ll be back!).  This meant that my Glamorgan sausages were destined to be stuffed with cheese leftovers from the fridge, including Cheshire, Cheddar and fresh flaked Parmesan.  I also, unaccountably, had no English mustard, so used wholegrain French instead.

I read several recipes and took what I wanted from them, adding an extra stage to all of them.  Whilst some recipes went straight from manufacture to rolling in egg and breadcrumbs and then straight into a pan of hot oil or butter, others added a 30 minute period in the refrigerator after rolling and before cooking.  I added an additional 30 minute period in the fridge between making the sausages and rolling them, because mine were rather on the wet side.  The 30 minutes did the trick delightfully.  I rolled them in the egg and then the breadcrumbs, and put them back in the fridge until they were needed.  The photos show the three stages in the process of completion:

• top – the newly manufactured sausage;
• middle – 30 minutes later rolled in egg and breadcrumbs;
• bottom – cooked after another long spell in the fridge and then left out to reach room temperature.

They were far too big to eat three, so one ended up on my plate and I’ll experiment with reheating the other two, seeing if they are viable cold and finding out whether they can be reheated whole or mashed into potato.

The ersatz Glamorgan sausage  was accompanied by chopped lamb steaks from the Aberdovey Butcher, who raises his own sheep, which I had cooked for an hour in a pan with carrots, shallots and mushrooms, some home made lamb stock, a slosh of red wine to add richness rather than flavour, and a lot of fresh thyme.  Some tender stem broccoli finished the plate.  Great fun.  Having eaten the local lamb many times before, I knew that that would be excellent and it was.  The sausages were rather strongly flavoured in the cheese department, unsurprisingly given the Cheddar and Parmesan, but they worked well enough, although for some reason they were a little angular rather than tubular!  Next time, it will definitely be Caerphilly, which will give them just the right balance between flavour and subtlety.