Taste: The Best Tradition

Consistency is the trick to sausage making.

It has been more than 50 years since Bass Farm Sausage started making pork sausage in Spring Hope, co-owner John Bass said. The company has grown and the people making it have changed, but the recipes are the same as when his grandmother, Florence Jenkins Bass, and father, Ralph Bass, created them.

“If you make it good and make it good all the time, you will develop a fairly large customer base,” Bass said.

It is a tradition Bruce Smith, owner of Smith’s Red and White, believes as well. The Smiths started their store in 1954 in Dortches with pork sausage recipes good enough that they still keep people coming back for more, he said.

“It has got to be the uniqueness of the taste of our sausage. It is definitely different than most other sausages,” Smith said.

Smith’s offers two kinds of sausage, mild and hot. Bass Farm has mild and hot, as well as links and patties. Both use pre-mixed seasonings to make sure they get the traditional taste with each batch.

Tradition is good, but both companies agree the popularity of their product also is due to its versatility as an ingredient.

People can enjoy sausage three meals a day and feel like they have gotten something completely different each time, Bass said. For example, you could have patties with eggs at breakfast, links in hot dog buns for lunch and ground up sausage in a casserole for dinner. You even could make sausage balls for an appetizer if you were really in the mood for it.

All these don’t begin to touch the different foods that can be spiced up with sausage, Smith said. While he prefers to throw some links on a grill in the summer, he likes sausage just as much as an ingredient in such dishes as pizza, spaghetti, chili, meatloaf, noodle bakes and even desserts.