January 2024
Before the frankfurter roll (1931), before the hotdog roll (1922), there was the saveloy roll (1911) a hot red sausage snuggling between the sides of a cloven bread roll finished off with mustard or tomato sauce dressing, or both.
The earliest mention of the saveloy goes back further to 1851, when it appears in a list of picnic foods. Since then the saveloy has been an integral part of the Australian table culinarily and culturally but it has gone unwritten about in Australian food history. This article redresses this, giving the saveloy ‘a fair suck of the sav’, a fair go. It does not discuss contemporaries of the saveloy – the frankfurter, the hotdog or the incarnations of the battered sausage on a stick – Dagwood dogs, Pluto pups. They have not made it as an Australian culinary icon that has become part of the Australian vernacular.
