The gentleman of Verona and his incredible sausage

And so it was that last Saturday I found myself a bemused onlooker as the audacious singer/songwriter strode into the tiny Bar al Ponte holding his cotechino aloft, bellowing an aria to his beautiful banger. “This is my sausage! Look at my sausage! My wonderful SAUSAGE!!” he sang before the sceptical locals.

“Call that a sausage?” they cried mockingly. “It’s tiny. An Englishman’s sausage is nothing compared to a proper Italian sausage!”

Tweedie has the mischievous twinkle of a young Orson Welles, and the look of an Eddie Izzard who has eaten more than his share of tiramisu. From the adoring gazes of ancient matriarchs to the backslapping camaraderie he shares with men half his age, it’s clear that he is well-loved here, his home of the past eight years together with his Italian wife Gloria and their children Max, 15, and Hannah, 17. But for all Tweedie’s charm and bonhomie, the joking and the teasing and embracing, there’s no doubt that his decision to lay his sausage on the line has caused a degree of unease in this deeply conservative region of Italy.

Ada Riolfi is chef patron of Enoteca della Valpolicella, a nationally renowned restaurant, and a fierce champion of the Valpolicella region’s traditional cuisine — dishes such as risotto with Riciotto, a dessert wine, and pearà, a kind of bread sauce often eaten with cotechino. She doesn’t mince her words. “It’s a beautiful thing that Danny is entering the competition,” she says. “He loves the area and he loves the people, and it shows that he really belongs here. But if he wins, it will be a disaster. It will mean that we’ve lost our roots.

“He could make the best cotechino in the world, but it’s not a technical exercise. The sausage must come from your heart and from your soul.” And has she tasted Tweedie’s sausage? “Yes,” she says. “And I admit it is very good. It has the necessary stickiness.”

That stickiness comes from a key ingredient in the cotechino — ground pig skin. As Tweedie explains: “They’re very much nose-to-tail eaters here, but they’re also ear-and-eyeball munchers, too — they’ll eat the lot. This is not a place for the squeamish, for people who can’t deal with the idea of eating, say, cow brain, or horse.

“The cotechino was born in the days when everyone kept a pig, and it contains basically everything that was left over after the animal had been killed and butchered. The fat from just under the skin — cotenna — gives it a lovely greasy, oily, gluey texture.”

Local farmers and butchers have been gathering in Bar al Ponte to boast of the superiority of their sausages over a glass or three of Valpolicella for decades, but it wasn’t until 1988 that a formal contest was initiated. To win the cotechino cup is a terrific source of pride. And for those in the meat trade in particular, the stakes are high.

Small wonder, then, that Tweedie’s entry has ruffled a few feathers, but he insists he is no flash in the pan. “I consider I’ve paid my dues,” he says. “I’ve been perfecting my recipe for eight years. This contest is treated with all the respect and seriousness that it deserves, and it’s a great honour for me to be part of it.

“Coming from a sausage nation like England,” he continues, “where you’ll have lamb and mint sausages, or pork and leek, for example, it does seem there’s a lack of variety here. Sausages are sausages, made within strict parameters to produce only a few varieties. Though the few they do have are exquisite.

“With the cotechino, the ratio of fat to meat is very important. People will add nutmeg, cinnamon, roughly chopped black pepper, and of course salt. The skins used will probably be horse intestine, possibly cow or pig.

“I wanted to add an ingredient that would fit within the tradition of the cotechino, and I decided on some Danish smoked salt, just to add something a touch different — an Italian would never use an ingredient outside the Italian idiom. There are also a couple of spoonfuls of Parmesan in there to sweeten it slightly, to take the edge off the heat of the salt. But I haven’t coloured out of the lines, so to speak — I don’t want to make a fool of myself. I’m quite serious. I’m in it to win it.”

On the eve of the competition, Tweedie takes me to a restaurant, Osteria alla Pieve, where a celebratory bottle of powerful Amarone is opened, and I am at last presented with a tray loaded with slices of the fabled sausage. There may be salami in my soul, but my heart, brain and arteries scream that this is something best avoided. To my surprise and relief, however, the cotechino is quite delicious, tasting something like warmed corned beef, only with the consistency of spam. Needless to say, it goes down handsomely with the Amarone.

But the following morning, disaster strikes: Tweedie’s enormous sausage has exploded. Cotechino needs to be boiled gently for up to three hours, and Tweedie had left instructions before going out for his son Max to turn off the cooker when it was done. But Max had been more focused on his Xbox than on his father’s lovingly crafted sausage, and when he returned home, it was to the pitiful detritus of a shattered dream.

It is 8am on Sunday; the festa kicks off at 9am. Tweedie is bleary-eyed, but sanguine. There is a back-up sausage, which he has stayed up half the night cooking. And another provided by his close friend Arone Gasparato who, having prepared for such a catastrophe, has taken the precaution of preparing one of Tweedie’s sausages himself. Tweedie might have slept soundly after all.

In the kitchen of Bar al Ponte, a gaggle of veteran cotechino aficionados are hard at work slicing up cotechino as fast as it is thrust in front of them. Over the course of the morning they will distribute 318kg of free cotechino to be consumed by the 1,000-plus sausage lovers who have gathered in and around the bar and in specially erected tents. A team from Rai Uno, the national TV station, has turned up; also a 35-strong, award-winning male-voice choir, the Coro El Vesoto. The choir sings the deeply moving ode to the cotechino:

“Oh cotechino, I salute you, I’ll smack a kiss upon your forehead.

And give you a great welcome as big as a mountain.

You upon our tables have finally arrived Words are not sufficient for the people who taste you.

To describe your delights — colour, aroma, taste — that you wear like a medal, Oh how you warm our hearts.

And when you’re really sticky you have a taste more great that you need to be a real baboon to not appreciate.”

Meanwhile, back inside Bar al Ponte, the ten jurors — two women and eight men — are settling down to the serious business of tasting sausages. Lisa Lambo, who works at the nearby Tommasi winery, explains the process to me. “The jurors will be looking at the colour of the cotechino, which will depend on whether nitrate has been used to preserve its pinkness. They will be considering the tackiness of the sausage. And they will be thinking about the quantity of salt and spice that has been used.” It is 10.30am and the bar already reeks of sausage and wine; the tension is as taut as a stretched small intestine.

While we lurk outside in the cold for the appreciation, cogitation and digestion to unfold within, trays laden with cotechino coming out thick and fast, and the vino flowing, I ask the deputy mayor of San Pietro in Cariano, Claudio Benetti, if he thinks the Englishman has bitten off more than he can chew. “Not at all,” he says. “It’s great that he’s competing, because cotechino is traditionally seen as a poor man’s food, and Danny is helping to change the image of the Italian sausage. This is not supermarket cotechino. It is something that you can only enjoy here. There are no strange ingredients. It’s natural and genuine.”

Tweedie is some way off at this point, there’s a lot of incomprehensible babble coming out of the Tannoy, and then suddenly I notice he’s going crackers, leaping about and punching the air. Has he won? Has he won? No one seems to know, no one seems to be able to make out what is being said over the atrocious sound system. Amid the confusion Tweedie whirls around, a beseeching look in his eye. Perhaps he hasn’t won? Didn’t they just announce his name?

They have announced his name. He’s been awarded 165 points out of a possible 300. And the results are filtering through in reverse order. He is tenth. The winner, with 214 points, is a team, Campagnia del Logo. But who cares about them? Later, when he has sobered up a little, Tweedie is philosophical. “It’s been a lot of fun, and realistically I was only ever going to finish tenth. This is important business for these guys — and this is Italy! It’s a great competition. Long may it continue, and long live the cotechino.”

So was Tweedie’s cotechino genuinely the limpest in the field? Or had he been a victim of Valpolicella’s shadowy sausage mafia? The winemakers Andrea Sartori and Hugo Consolo, who finished fifth last year, had jokingly told me: “We are confident. We’ve played it by the book. And this year our innovation is that we’ve paid the jury €200 . . .” Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists, this year they finished ninth, only three points above Tweedie.

We shall probably never know how those ten sausage-tasters good and true reached their final verdict, but one thing is certain — the story of the Englishman who tried to slip his sausage into Italians’ hearts will pass into Valpolicella legend.

And should Tweedie’s name emerge from the hat for the 24th Festa del Cotechino and allow him a second bite at the sausage, there may be a glimmer of hope: your new sausage correspondent has been invited to sit on next year’s jury.