Charlie Larga’s Field Guide to Life in Cuenca: The sausage rolls of time

In England in the early 1960s, my parents were fiercely loyal to Sainsbury’s pork sausages. This was before Sainsbury’s was a supermarket, and you had to get in line at each counter.

They swore they had “a bit of extra taste,” and for all I know, they were right. Sainsbury’s was a cut above then — you didn’t just get meat and filler; you got seasoning with a purpose. There was something in there — mace, nutmeg, ginger — that made you eat one and then think about the next before you’d even swallowed.

Anyway, they rarely made the 250-mile journey from my Grandma’s in suburban London to the north of England without smuggling a pack of Sainsbury’s sausages wrapped in white paper over the Yorkshire county line.

Fast-forward sixty years and several thousand miles to Cuenca, where the local Sainsbury’s equivalent is Supermaxi. They don’t make the pork sausages I grew up with, although Cuencana sausages might do at a pinch,  but they do have very decent ground pork, the sort that behaves well when you season it and doesn’t sulk into dryness. Their spice aisle has most of what an English butcher would recognise — salt, pepper, sage, thyme — though I don’t think “macis” has ever made an appearance.

For puff pastry, Supermaxi again comes through. Not hand-laminated in Paris by a chain-smoking baker named Marcel, but still perfectly serviceable for wrapping around seasoned pork and calling it a sausage roll.

On a recent afternoon I found myself doing exactly that — only this time with my own seasoning mix and a dash of ginger beer plant for tang. The rolls baked golden in the air fryer, emerging with that same mysterious “extra taste” I remembered from Sainsbury’s, 1963 edition.

There’s another perk to making your own sausage mix: you can pinch off a bit, press it into discs,  and fry it into breakfast patties. These go well with eggs, toast, or simply eaten while leaning on the kitchen counter, wondering why you ever thought you’d had enough to eat.

So while Sainsbury’s sausages may be half a world and half a century away, the taste is still here — just hiding in the meat section of Supermaxi, waiting for the right hands to bring it back.