In Britain’s banger battle with the EU, pig-headedness is a delicacy

So, the United Kingdom and the European Union are engaged in a sausage war. Given the amount of willy waving that’s gone on over Brexit, it’s perhaps inevitable that it would come to this.

Pedants point out that in reality very few sausages travel from the British mainland to Northern Ireland, and that actually trades in other chilled meats are rather more important. But just as Monty Python’s Jesus blessed the cheesemakers as a catch-all reference to manufacturers of any dairy products, it seems reasonable to allow headline writers to boil the present row down to the humble snag.

Never mind of course that the war is a result of the UK not wanting to follow the regulations willingly agreed by our government in order to get Brexit done. If we don’t like rules we’ve signed up to, who is the EU or anyone else to say we have to stick to them? What does the Northern Ireland protocol matter when the Liverpool to Belfast chipolata trade is on the line?

There may be a faint irony (there usually is in Brexit tales) in the fact that the very British “sausage” is derived from the French “saucisse”; even chipolata is a French word, originally from the Italian “cipollata”. Still, “banger” is definitely English, a reference to our inability to cook even a sausage correctly, allowing it instead to explode in a too hot pan.

That said, as a child I rather preferred a split sausage to one that had stayed in its skin. Generally, we had the Newmarket variety – the town being only a few miles from our Cambridgeshire village – and I loved the way a splitter’s splurged innards would crisp up under the grill. They were best with mash; or bubble and squeak.

Occasionally there would be arguments around the dinner table about who got which sausage, size vying for crispness, as my brother and I fought our own banger battles. It seems little has changed in the Gore household: I saw my brother and father having a heated debate over a piece of saucisson only last week.

Thirteen years ago, my wife and I began exploring a variety of small towns north of London, looking to move out of the capital. Berkhamsted stood out for several reasons, but not least among them was our discovery on our first visit here of Eastwoods butcher shop. It has kept us well-stocked for sausages ever since, and their sausage rolls are sublime.

In the end, the best of all sausages must be the black pudding. I remember vividly my first taste of a slice, for breakfast in a pub we were staying in during a family holiday in the Forest of Dean. I knew full well what was in it, and generally speaking I was an irritating food fusspot as a seven-year-old – but for some reason, I took to blood sausage like Count Duckula to claret.

Two decades later, when staying in Strasbourg for a conference, I ordered a boudin noir in a city centre restaurant, only for my horrified companion to check that I knew what I was ordering. I was. And it was delicious.

But the English version is king. After all, anything that goes equally as well with a scallop, a fried egg or a slice of apple is some sort of gastronomic alchemy. If ever a dish were worth a fight, this would be it.

I think it was that greatest of all Britons, Winston Churchill, who said in 1940: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat… but if you wrap them in a pig’s intestine, then in a thousand years men will still say, ‘this sausage was their finest hour’.”

So now come, grab a saveloy and join me, and let us fight on the beaches before this sausage situation goes from bad to wurst.