Skip to main content

The playground of my childhood was vastly different from that of my peers. A few days a week, my mom would drop me off at my grandfather's butcher shop, Salett's, to do my homework and spend the hours between school and dinnertime out of her hair. Under the watchful eye of Betty the cashier, my cousin and I would play a high-adrenaline rendition of hide-and-seek we called "Get Down! Get Down!" – which involved ducking behind hanging beef carcasses in the warehouse-sized refrigerator and crouching beside buckets of rendered pork fat, fingers pointed like guns at imaginary bad guys and piles of lamb shanks.

On most days, though, I sat curled up on milk crates behind the cash register, devouring book after book while my grandfather, in his blood-spattered white coat, brought me snacks like corned cow's tongue on Wonder Bread and chicken liver pâté spread thick on Ritz Crackers. When he kissed me his cheeks were always cold from hours spent in the cutting room, a room that all the grandkids called "the stinky room" but that he somehow emerged from smelling like Calvin Klein Obsession.

I never really took an interest in what my grandfather and his brother, Bobby, were doing in the cutting room until second grade, when I began reading the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I got the full set all at once from the Scholastic book fair at my school. I was so taken by their covers' pastel-checkered borders and colored-pencil drawings of cherubic homesteader children that I rearranged an entire corner of my bedroom in order to properly display them. The books were wildly popular with the girls in my class at that time, and many of them took to playing "Little House" at recess. I didn't find the game nearly as thrilling as the books, partially because of the humiliation of always being forced to play Pa Wilder (in fairness, my bowl cut did make me the only viable candidate for the role).

One day, while playing the game, I pretended to walk in the door with a dead pig slung over my shoulder, ready to cut up for dinner, just as Pa Wilder does in Little House in the Big Woods. The girls were horrified. "This book is from a long time ago," they said. "People don't do that any more." I was mortified, mostly because I knew that people – my people – did indeed still do that.

After school that day I paid close attention to my grandfather and great-uncle – the fluid dance of carrying in the pigs from the truck and the focused silence that came once the animals were all on the cutting table, the way their hands changed position on their knives at the same time, in perfect choreography, and I felt proud. I watched as the pigs turned into smaller and more recognizable parts, flipping back through passages in the book for reference – "There were hams and shoulders, side meat and spare-ribs and belly. There was the heart and the liver and the tongue, and the head to be made into headcheese, and the dish-pan full of bits to be made into sausage."

I saw the bin of tails and briefly imagined asking my grandfather for one to fry over the fire as the Wilder girls did, but the thought made my knees weak, so I decided to focus on the sausage instead. We ate a lot of sausage in my house growing up, pulling it from the freezer where it was packed in bulk in my grandpa's black-and-white checkerboard bags. He made only three kinds: a spicy Italian, dotted red with paprika and cayenne; a sweet Italian, studded with plump fennel seeds; and a liver sausage that my dad wouldn't allow past our doorstep. After reading Little House in the Big Woods I asked Papa if he would make breakfast sausage like Ma Wilder made, "seasoned with salt and pepper and with dried sage leaves from the garden."

I knew my grandpa loved breakfast sausage from our semi-frequent trips to Bickford's Pancake House. He always ordered a side of them with his Western omelette and drowned them in that viscous maple syrup, cutting them up with the side edge of his fork rather than picking them up and eating them in two bites as my dad did. Despite how much we all liked them, my grandpa never made them at Salett's. Sage was expensive, and he already knew what his customers wanted to buy – it would have been a waste if nobody bought them, and avoiding wastefulness was the entire purpose of sausage in the first place. He was correct, of course, so the shrink-wrapped logs of Jimmy Dean that my dad always got from the supermarket to sate his craving for breakfast sausage continued to fill our freezer.

Today I work in a butcher shop with more than 80 varieties of sausages. They are packed with cheese and piles of finely diced herbs, pickled vegetables, wine, and toasted spices. I teach sausage-making classes to people who are passionate and knowledgeable about the subject, and every time the class sells out I am amazed by how much things have changed since I was a kid. Yet even with all of these varieties available, breakfast sausage remains one of my favourites.

Excerpted from the book Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way Through Great Books by Cara Nicoletti. Copyright ©2015 by Cara Nicoletti. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Interact with The Globe