Glamorgan sausage: a cheesy St David’s Day treat

St David’s Day approaches. I’ve been marking just about every high day and holiday that I possibly can recently, in a bid to differentiate my lockdown days. But with a Welsh husband and Welsh in-laws, I don’t need any extra encouragement to celebrate St David’s Day. Joining the obligatory Welsh cakes, and possibly some bara brith, this year is the Glamorgan sausage.

If you’re thinking ‘what the hell is a Glamorgan sausage?’, then come over and join me in my corner, it’s cosy here, and we have snacks. I confess that when I first decided to make glamorgan sausages, I wasn’t 100 per cent sure what they actually were.

It’s a vegetarian sausage, but not the Linda McCartney variety. They’re sausages in the technical sense, in that they’re sausage-shaped, and they have a filling kept in place by a casing, but they’re much closer to a Spanish croquette than a banger or a frankfurter. In place of the bechamel you find in a croquette is Welsh cheese – lots of Welsh cheese – along with breadcrumbs, leeks, and some herbs and seasonings, and it’s then coated in more breadcrumbs, which are fried until crunchy.

In its earliest incarnation, the sausage was a more traditional one, containing pork meat, but during the meat shortages of the second world war, it became something quite different. Named after the historic county of Glamorgan, the sausage originally used Glamorgan cheese, but the near extinction of the Glamorgan dairy herd put an end to that, so the nearby Caerphilly cheese tends to be used instead. For the aforementioned reason, I’ve never tasted Glamorgan cheese, but Caerphilly is excellent here: crumbly, almost bright white, and with a slight sourness for a cow’s cheese. It melts beautifully, which makes it perfect for the Glamorgan sausage, which should be a little gooey when warm.