I Went On A Quest To Uncover The Origin Of This Sausage With A Face
Picture this: the school bell rings and you rush outside to get the good spot on the oval before it’s nabbed by the scary girls from the grade above you. You open up your lunchbox and tear the cling wrap off your sandwich, excited to see what culinary delights await.
Lifting up the corner of the bread, you see it peeking back at you: a slab of processed meat with a face, smiling and unblinking.
You’re a kid, so you don’t register how cooked this is until much later in life, when you realise most of life outside school is just paying rent and dealing with lower back pain. But I have been on that journey and I simply must know: At what point did we as a society decide composite meat rolls needed to be adorned by a deeply unsettling face?
Anecdotal evidence suggests you either know it or you don’t. When it first came up in conversation in this very office a couple of years ago, it was met by either a nonchalant, “Oh yeah, I remember that” by some, or a pure, unadulterated existential crisis by others who simply couldn’t process what they were seeing.
To our friends from South Australia, it’s known as Smiley Fritz, and apparently invites “a warm feeling of nostalgia” for anyone who grew up there. I’m not here to judge another person’s feelings about their processed meat of choice, so do with that information what you will.
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Old mate Smiley Fritz isn’t a thing of the past, either – it’s still very much available around SA, though the free hand-outs that many South Australians fondly remember are no more after a grocery store customer slipped on a rogue slice.
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(Let’s all take a moment to appreciate this cute dachshund enjoying his Smiley Fritz sanga while wearing a Smiley Fritz badge.)
Smiley Fritz is actually an anthropomorphised version of Bung Fritz – a sausage recipe unique to SA thanks to the way it’s made. The sausage itself is thought to be a product of German migration to the Adelaide region. Local legend has it that it was invented in the 1880s by a butcher named Fritz from Adelaide or Lobethal, though some sources say it may have actually been invented in – *gasp* – Melbourne.
Either way, it’s unclear when somebody looked at it and thought, “Tastes good, but needs more face”.
Fritz imposters are available around the country, too. In NSW, Queensland, and the ACT, it’s generally called “devon”, though Queenslanders have also been known to call it “Windsor sausage”. In WA, they call it “polony” and, across the ditch, “Belgium” or “luncheon sausage”, but none of those monikers necessarily guarantee a unique Fritz recipe is used or that it’ll come with a face.
You can also buy Devon “Smiley Loaf” at Woolies if you prefer to do the slicing yourself.
It’s possible those sausage-loving upstarts were inspired by the ever-so-slightly more palatable Billy Roll, which hails from Ireland but also has German roots.
Billy Roll was reportedly invented by the Feldhues family, who owned a butcher shop in the German state of Westphalia. They set up shop in Ireland in the ‘80s, where they churned out Billy Roll and Billy Bear (which is – you guessed it – a meat roll featuring a teddy bear design) using a process that’s been shrouded in secrecy since its inception. And while I absolutely respect the production chops this takes, I’m still not 100% clear on the motive.
Whatever it is, both Billy Roll and Billy Bear have been beloved lunch staples of Irish kids ever since. In fact, Irish expats were horrified back in 2016 to discover Billy Roll was being marketed elsewhere in Europe under the somehow even less appealing name of “Meat Clown”.
Client: "No one buys processed meat anymore. It's seen as unhealthy. What can we do?"
Agency: 'We've an idea….' pic.twitter.com/wnxMykUP7f
— James Herring (@itsjamesherring) June 6, 2016
I reached out to the good people at the Bung Fritz Appreciation Society and the Australian Meat Industry Council to see if they had any idea when the face started appearing, but sadly didn’t hear back in time to publish this truly urgent piece of investigative journalism.
So while we may never know if Billy Roll or Fritz came first, one this certain: it sure as hell wasn’t Meat Clown.