When it was settled that my wife and I were going to London for her work (shameless plug: listen to No Gods No Mayors), I was embarrassed to find myself with absolutely no answers to questions about where I was going to eat. I don’t know why I felt embarrassed, as I don’t live in London and haven’t been there since I was 17. But despite reading Vittles and having gone to the Dishoom pop-up when it visited New York, I had very little idea of London’s culinary geography.
I had my fantasies though. I know London is as diverse and culinarily exciting as the city I live in, but just as any tourist will want to come to New York and get a bagel and cream cheese, I wanted some form of recognizably white British food before I moved on to everything else the city had to offer. At a party one night, I listened to comrade — and Gourmet worker-owner and frequent London visitor —Nozlee Samadzadeh gush about the sausage rolls at the Ginger Pig, a small butchery chain that sells all manner of ready-to-eat meat pies and rolls. As my main association with London is Sweeney Todd, I put it on my list (don’t ask me why a musical about cannibalism should make me want a meat pie, there is no limit to the mysteries of the human heart).
Loopy from our red-eye, we met up with friends and walked over to the location in Borough Market, where they indulged us Americans as we ordered a traditional and a pork and Stilton sausage roll. They were heavy, not the snack I had envisioned, but a fistful of meat in a fluffy pastry, sausage crowning from each end like a birth. We found seats by the river and ate.
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About halfway through the pork and Stilton roll — the ideal, everything I had imagined: funky, sweet and so thoroughly meaty; like biting into the rich and fatty earth — I became furious. This seems like the most basic portable foodstuff, and yet in America it is relegated to neo-pubs and the occasional butcher getting cheeky with it. Why should I have to travel all the way to London to have something like this on the regular? Why, in my meat-and-potatoes country, which was at one time colonized by the British and has kept all manner of ridiculous British habits, didn’t this one stick? We’re still measuring things in yards instead of meters but I can’t get a sausage roll at the deli?
We have so many things that are sausage-roll-esque, and it's clear that if 7-Eleven were to just start selling British sausage rolls they would make a killing. Pigs in a blanket abound, Jimmy Dean sells those frozen pancake-wrapped sausage sticks, and what is a corn dog but a sausage roll made with that most American of grains?
We are so close, guys. Just seal the edges of your sausage sandwiches and call it a day, Dunkin'.
Three Other Great Dishes I Had In London