Cured sausage

Cured sausage is fermented and then aged, and both stages produce amines. Surveys of fermented sausage find histamine and tyramine together, and the longer the drying the more of both. High microbial counts are what a fermented sausage IS, so amines accumulate — and great fluctuations are reported within a single type of product. Suzzi also records that no specific regulation covers these compounds in sausages, where fishery products have legal ceilings. An absence of limits is not a statement that the amounts are small.

Dry fermented sausage is the one tyramine food with a full probabilistic risk assessment behind it - 474 sausages against national consumption data - and that assessment exists precisely because the levels reach the range that matters for MAOI patients. Both the fermentation and the drying that follows add to it. A probabilistic estimate across 474 of these sausages puts a meal at 6.2 mg of tyramine and 1.39 mg of histamine on average — negligible risk for a healthy person, a 34 per cent chance of passing the MAOI threshold, and an estimated 7,000 people per million with histamine intolerance who could react.

A cured sausage gets no salicylate from the meat; the pepper, paprika, garlic and herbs in the cure supply it. A plainly seasoned sausage sits lower than a heavily spiced one.

A cured sausage is meat and fat dried in its casing, and drying takes water out rather than putting fructan or lactose in. Garlic is the usual exception and it is on the label; a fresh sausage, by contrast, is often bulked with rusk or breadcrumb, which is wheat.

Cured sausage is meat, fat, salt and spice - none of which carries gluten. What can is the binder: rusk, breadcrumb or wheat starch, used in some recipes and not others. What a label may promise is set by regulation and not by a recipe: 828/2014 allows "gluten-free" at or below 20 mg/kg, sets the conditions oats must meet, and admits wheat-derived ingredients in a gluten-free food provided the finished product stays under that ceiling. It measures nothing — it says what a food must meet to carry the claim, which is exactly what a food name cannot tell you.

Cured sausage is meat, fat, salt and spice, dried in air. The nickel comes from the spice mix rather than the meat, which is why a heavily peppered sausage differs from a plain one. The nickel here follows a national survey covering four decades - the kind of series that shows whether a level is drifting, which a single study never can.