On the road...again!
Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams
Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
By Dick Pellek

The Sausage Makers

Of the many reveries about those years in the poor country of Cape Verde, the fragmented tale about the Austrian sausage makers is likely to be full of holes, like a Swiss cheese.  That is because as much as I liked the Austrian colleagues with whom I shared many laughs, the story about their sausage making skills is unfortunately so fragmented that it might be boiled down to a series of one-liners.

Two Austrian technical assistance counterparts that Footloose Forester bumped into were blended into a disjointed saga about a modern sausage crafting/cold storage plant that slowly began to take place somewhere in one of the dry valleys on the island of Santiago.  At that location there was no power grid and no electricity, so it was curious to learn how and when a modern food processing plant was going to operate.  Apparently, the Austrian government included the construction and operating costs of the plant into their project and they sent two technicians to oversee the operations.  We probably met at the plant, shortly after it opened.  Upon further reflection, it may have been his Belgian friend and FAO technician Paul DeWit who mentioned that the plant had opened, so Footloose Forester made it a point to drop in and see the operation for himself.

Footloose Forester was welcomed with a big smile and handshake.  He also got an immediate showing of the layout.  The best part was when jovial Fritz went into the huge refrigeration unit and came back with a few samples of his own-recipe sausage.  The Footloose Forester couldn't wait to take them home and cook them up.  Up until that time, sausage did not exist on the shelves of local markets and sausage was definitely a breakfast favorite. 

 The Austrians built a food processing plant for the Cape Verdeans

The Austrian sausage was fantastic!  And we became fast friends, including meeting Fritz's his wife at their home and arranging a fishing trip aboard the US Embassy sloop.   What a serendipity to discover that Footloose Forester was alllowed to rent the 36-foot sloop for a mere $6 per day.  

The fishing expedition was not as productive as we had hoped, since only the Bengal Tiger caught a fish, but we made the most of the experience.  Another expatriate in our group, a Dutchman sailor who had been hired by the US Embassy to navigate and care for the sloop, announced that it was his custom to take a bite out of the first fish he landed but because nobody but the Bengal Tiger caught a fish, he bit into her fish, with her permission.  We all wanted to see that spectacle.

A little later, we swapped a few tall tales about travel.  That was when Fritz regaled us with a tale about his youthful adventures in Australia and his plan to return home to Austria on a tight budget.  He was in no particular hurry, so he booked passage on a tramp steamer heading in the general direction of Europe. With the sloop erupting with laughter, Fritz told us that it took 10 months to get home.

On a sad note, for a lover of good breakfast sausage, the Footloose Forester discovered, months later, that the presumptive Austrian sausage recipe had been altered by the Cape Verdeans.  They infused so much garlic into the sausages that it no longer was appealing to the Footloose Forester.  By now, they managed the meat processing plant and it was theirs to operate as they saw fit.