A Modern Travesty

I WAS eating a folhado de salsicha (sausage roll) and, being a rather strange chap with some very unusual habits, performed my usual trick of consuming the edge of the pastry first and saving the part containing the length of sausage until the end. It was then that the veil of mystery fell away, reality hit me right between the eyes and I experienced a sudden awakening.

Having nibbled my way into the centre, I discovered that the four-inch sausage was in fact comprised of two inch-long cocktail sausages and that there was no centre to speak of. Instead of a central portion of sausage meat I found nothing but a yawning abyss of pure nothingness. Multiplied exponentially, therefore, the combined spaces between the two small sausages on several thousand of these inferior products would amount to something in the region of a miniature Ginnungagap.

The first thing that sprang to mind - apart from feeling as though I should expose these miserable misers for what they are - was the medieval practice of coin-clipping, whereby criminals were known to remove the metal edges on gold currency and melt all the pieces down until they had something of value. In a shocking reversal of this trend, hungry customers are left with a pile of absolute zilch and there seems little doubt that the coin-clippers of yesteryear are the antecedents of the penny-pinching bakers of today.