Kranjska Sausage - Jernej Mlekuž

Carniolan sausage writes Slovenian history (also) with the stains it left in the Slovenian newspaper – in the words of Ivan Prijatelj, “an instrument that played a major role in the cultural and civilizational rebirth of the Slovenian people into a nation”. Not only are great men (and here and there a woman) and events ugly stained with the stains of Carniolan sausage. Topics – such as national awakening, political competition, money-making, cultural show-off, the spirit of revolution and the end of history – are like meat and fat forcibly squeezed into the intestines of Carniolan sausages into individual periods: the Austro-Hungarian period, the first and second Yugoslavia and independent Slovenia. The book presents a sparkling, analytically penetrating and methodologically sound, but at the same time extremely brief, in places shocking and elsewhere distinctly brief analysis of the nation through the spirit of sausage or the national dish that carried Slovenia into space. The revelation of the meanings of Carniolan sausage and their changes can therefore be read as a kind of dense description, or even better, a description of Slovenian society and culture based on an exemplary example of material culture analysis.