Newmarket sausage

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The Newmarket Sausage is one of a handful of traditional cuisines from the town of Newmarket. There are two very different types of Newmarket Sausage due to two different family butchers claiming the name, but both are very popular and sold around the country nowadays in supermarkets and specialist sausage shops.

One version of the Newmarket Sausage is the “Musk’s” variety. This name derives from the Musk’s family butchers located in Newmarket town centre, where the recipe was originally conceived in 1884, and has since remained unchanged. The inventor, James Musk, created a very popular sausage that was awarded the Royal Warrant by various Kings and Queens in British history, and most recently by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005.

The other version, commercially more successful and well known, is the Powter’s Newmarket Sausage. The younger of the two recipes (conceived in 1896 by William Harper when trading under his own name ), Powter’s Sausages use to have a bigger presence in British supermarkets. Both varieties have won several awards.

In recent years, the European Union has tried to persuade the Newmarket Sausage companies to merge recipes to gain “protected geographical indication”, which products such as Parma ham and Stilton cheese have benefitted from. It would mean that their use of the Newmarket label would be protected to them for the sausage market, but it would also mean that only one of the two versions of Newmarket sausage could exist. Faced with this problem, both parties stand firmly by their recipe for the Newmarket sausage, and neither want to bow down nor merge recipes to create a single Newmarket sausage.^{[citation needed]}