For the love of sausages | Life and style | guardian.co.uk

The sausage: a reason to be cheerful. Photograph: Alamy

While I've been writing this guide I've found that sausages hold a special place in people's affections. With little prompting, friends, acquaintances and strangers would invariably smile and tell me about their favourite type or a fond memory. For everyone loves sausages; even the most sophisticated gourmet finds them nigh irresistible. That's probably down to the fact that they evoke just the right sort of childhood memories: of barbecues on the beach or camp fires in the forest, a football match or cosy Sunday breakfast.

They also reveal strong feelings of national pride. British people adore their bready bangers. Germans, on the other hand, are proud of their high meat content and their sausage laws dating back hundreds of years. I recently met an Italian blacksmith living in France who carries an electric meat slicer in the boot of his car because, coming from Bologna, he is convinced that no Frenchman will be capable of slicing his salame as paper-thin as it should be. But when you look closer at the sausages of any country you realise that you can't really make hard and fast rules: everywhere has too many exceptions.

The more I delved into this world of sausages, the more delightful examples I discovered. As well as beautiful ruby red salami and nut-brown kielbasa, there are comically shaped, bulbous creations stuffed into stomachs, there are long dried sticks, gleaming coils, tiny round balls, and more. Making use of local ingredients or sometimes a seasonal glut (I love the creativity that seasonal gluts produce) generates startling sausages made green with spinach, black pudding pungent with sweet potato leaves, or cuttlefish sausages teamed with fermented rice.

We scoured the world to find examples of these brilliant varieties but occasionally we had to admit defeat. The flour-filled lamb's lung made by the Uyghurs, the strawberry-flavoured chorizo from Mexico and the fish sausages from Finland all eluded us. I'd love to find them one day.

But above all, hot sausages are the best possible comfort food, especially during a cold wet spring. Served up with some spectacularly good mashed potato or tangy sauerkraut, or even just in a roll with ketchup, they induce what is known as "hygge". It's a Danish word, meaning a warm, cozy feeling of well-being. Soul food. But I think it could just as well be translated as "sausage".

For me, of course I love my native sausages: beef, venison, and haggis, so long as they are made with natural casings. But the more I researched, the more I realised why I liked particular types better than others - the way they are made greatly affects the underlying flavour. With so much variety I now find it far more difficult to be tied down to favourites; it depends on my mood, the weather, what I'm doing and so on. I'm still collecting sausage stories so tell us yours: what you like best, and why. And I keep smiling at the thought of them.

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