If it's not horror tales of ground-up eyeballs and awful offal making up the insides of bangers, then it's all about the fat content hardening our arteries.

Enough is enough, says Preston's very own supermarket chain, Booths, as the bosses invited me to take a look at its sausage-making operation from start to finish.

And they let me in on a secret.

To mark Lancashire day – next Thursday – Booths is creating a very special Lancashire sausage. And they even let me have a sneak preview.
I wasn't the first to taste it mind.

After the boffins have developed any special Booths recipe it is first taste tested by the supermarket's hierarchy, including company chairman Mr Edwin Booth, whose opinions count. Any recommended tweaks to the recipe will be made on their say-so, before it hits the shelves of the Lancashire, Cumbria, Cheshire and Yorkshire shops.

The Lancashire sausage recipe is a result of brain-storming between fresh food general manager Nigel Cokell, production manager for fresh foods Steve Connolly and senior new product technologist Nicola Broxup.

So what summed up the essence of Lancashire that could be included within the new sausage?

Hot pot certainly, but a bit tricky to contain in a sausage skin.
Cheese?

Yes, and it is possible to include cheese in a sausage mix but not on this occasion.

Black pudding?

Definitely. Black pudding from Bury market to be precise.
And ale of course, a product close to many a Lancastrian's heart.
The Three Bs Tacklers Tipple from Blackburn.

Nigel (a Yorkshireman, but we'll let that pass) allowed me a peek at the trial ingredient sheet – belly and shoulder pork, spice and seasonings including pepper, nutmeg, pimento, ginger, coriander, ale, black pudding and rusk – but the final details and quantities remain under wraps.

It's a Booth secret.

However, I can tell you that having had a sneak taste (after the final receipe was given the OK by Mr Edwin and Co), that they are generously porky with a real flavour of the black pudding coming through. The ale adds a flavour that is not too overpowering and the seasoning well judged. A sausage that can proudly declare its red rose roots.

Nigel said: "Booths has been serving the people of Lancashire for more than 160 years, so we wanted to do our bit to celebrate Lancashire Day.

We thought it was time for Lancashire to take on the giants of the sausage world like the Cumberland Sausage and the Lincolnshire Sausage.

"That's why we decided to create a Lancashire Sausage that gives people a real taste of this great county. We spent a long time experimenting with different combinations of ingredients before coming up with a sausage made from local pork, black pudding and beer, that we think is bursting with flavour."

To walk around the fresh foods depot at Ribbleton, Preston, where Booths HQ is now based following its move from Glovers Court in the city centre, is an education.

Nigel tells me that each week there are in the region of eight to nine tonnes of sausages produced here to be distributed to more than 25 stores throughout the north west.

That's Keswick to the north, Knutsford to the South and Ripon (when it opens next year) to the east. And if you add 'em up that's in the region of 150,000 sausages.

Quite a number of bangers from the UK's remaining independent grocery chain. But, mind bogglingly, that number triples at Christmas.

A team of just five per shift oversees the sausage making, a process that involves feeding the cuts of belly and shoulder pork into the mincer before blending with the seasoning and filling the intestines with the meat (sheep's intestines for slim sausages and stronger hog's for jumbo bangers).

"The sausages," says Nigel, "are made from belly pork and shoulder from Cumbria and Yorkshire, around 25 per cent belly pork and 55 per cent shoulder. That, we find, is the best combination for us. Some people use more meat content but we find that makes it too dry. Through trial and error we find that proportion makes the best combination for us."
The entire process is rigorously checked.

Metal detectors along the processing line weed out the chance of a foreign body, in the shape of a piece of machinery, finding its way into a sausage. And meticulous systems mean that in the rare event of a customer complaint the offending sausage can be traced right back to source and when exactly it was made.

While Booths uses the best quality product and doesn't do 'cheap and nasty' because they believe that is not what their customers want, they still have to look at costs.

Nigel says: "We are mindful of prices. Our customers are not recession proof and we have got to look after them. If we don't, they will go somewhere else. Nothing upsets us more than getting complaints."