Ous for Us: Egg sausage at Carnival Time

We've written before about the myriad festivals and holidays in Barcelona, each one with with special foods to eat.  The Catalan News blog/podcast episode on Carnival mentions the yellow sausages we'd been seeing, as well as the pork cracklings, and sugary fried pastries we've sampled at restaurants -- and a number of other strange/fun customs; they also said that during Lent, folks don't give up much, so it's just a great excuse to indulge  :-)

Botifarra d’ou (botifarra with egg) is a traditional sausage that contains egg in the mixture and is traditionally eaten on dijous gras (Fat Thursday) and during the week before Ash Wednesday, the end of Carnival. The tradition goes back a long time to when pigs were killed  ("sacrificar ": sacrificed) in November, and by Carnival time what was left was mostly offal, so sausages were made of these. 

Barcelona's Ajutanment (City Hall) describes these unusual sausages:

Botifarra d’ou (egg pork sausage) and truita (omelette) are associated with Carnival, in other words, the last days before the start of Lent, when it is forbidden to eat either eggs or meat.

Botifarra d’ou is made from head meat, shoulder, cansalada (fat bacon), eggs, salt and black pepper. The egg gives it a yellowish colour and it has a grainy texture. It is very similar to botifarra blanca (white sausage) in the way it is made, its shape and its taste.

Originally, both botifarra d’ou and omelette were the typical food of Carnival and, more specifically, Dijous Gras (Fat Thursday), aka "omelette day" or "egg and pork day"And in the past children went from house to house to get eggs to make the typical dishes of the day, which were omelettes and eggs mixed with meat or botifarra d’ou, and coca de llardons. This gastronomic custom, which still lives on in family circles, is a reminder of the big meals that were made before Lent, when they were compulsory for everyone.

We'd been seeing these unusually yellow colored sausages in stores and butchers so we decided to seek them out. A few minutes away, at xarcuteria Anna Subirats we bought one, and saw they had a sign for variants flavored with mixes of vegetables but none in stock. Our quest took us just a few blocks more, where we wandered the lovely Mercat de Sant Antoni which has many butchers specializing in sausages, and found Xarcuteria Neus which had plain and also butifarra d'ou with carxofa (artichoke) and another with escalavida (a mix of roasted vegetables including red peppers and eggplant); we got a length of each to compare.

Neus' escalavida, carxofa, Subirat's plain

For dinner, Irene sautéed the sausages in a bit of olive oil to keep it simple, and cooked up some lentejas (lentils) to go with them.

The Subirats sausage had a more coarse, typically pork sausage texture and flavor, with definite pork in the aroma. Xarcuteria Neus had a much finer texture, almost like German weisswurst, and more eggy aroma. We preferred Neus' botifarra, and liked the additional red pepper accent in the one with escalavida.