table talk / By Joseph Byrd

Pride of McKinleyville

A reunion with the king and queen of sausage

(Dec. 25, 2008)  In 1990, two years after we moved to McKinleyville, a deli opened across from Cal’s Unocal station. Cal’s wife Ann had alerted us. “They make their own sausage!” So we were almost their first customers. And there were indeed sausages, fascinating ones like a Northern Italian-style with fennel, garlic and red wine, Moroccan lamb sausage, Swedish potato sausage, liver sausage with pistachios and mushrooms, dry salami, slabs of smoked bacon. And the best hot dogs we’d had since L.A.

The name was less creative: “Central Plaza Meat and Deli.” A higher level of imagination was behind the counter, staffed by attractive blondes, none of them so pretty as co-owner Laura Lawson. Her husband, Roger, a casually handsome man, had risen through the ranks of meat cutters (E&O Market in Blue Lake, Ray’s, and the high-end Fifth and L Market). He was charming, garrulous, ambitious and loved to experiment, so Beni and I were willing subjects for the multitude of things he tried — most, to be sure, destined to go nowhere — as he honed his charcuterie to what they could sell. (Lamb sausage, alas, was too radical for McKinleyville.)

GALLERY >

After a year, they began shrink-wrapping and selling to local markets. One significant equipment investment, long before commodity producers tried it, was a 500-pound “tumbler,” a magical vacuum-sealed machine that tumbled meat in a marinade for 12 hours or more, turning dry turkey breasts succulent and tender. They bought an industrial “smoker,” and began producing boneless hams that were tender and flavorful, marketing their products at regional food fairs, under the name “Humboldt Sausage Works.”

I loved that name — it credited our rural locale, at the same time providing a kind of funky romance, like “Iron Works” and “Skunk Works”.

The Lawsons were the hardest-working couple we’d ever known — and the food industry is grueling, demanding work, most often cruelly unprofitable. (Remember this the next time someone says, “You should bottle and sell this,” or “You ought to start a restaurant.”)

They routinely put in 14-hour days, Roger supervising production and dealing with both suppliers and customers (and he is really good at it, a key to their success), Laura keeping books, payroll and the immaculate provenance and testing records required by the USDA — there was an inspector on the premises almost constantly. (You didn’t know that? Yep, if you are handling anything that can harbor bacteria, you are under constant surveillance. This is the problem with country hams hanging in smokehouses, or sausages preserved in caves. You are free to make them. You just can’t sell them.)

Humboldt Sausage Works products were so good they began to impress gourmands in Sonoma and the Bay Area, gaining a niche beyond local markets. And gradually they evolved from a deli into a manufacturer. Roger learned how to make pancetta, the sweet, rolled, Italian-style bacon, which we hadn’t cooked with for a decade. Their charcuterie, initially including andouille (Cajun sausage), linguiça, knackwurst and bratwurst, expanded to chicken sausages, with imaginative combinations: Cajun, apples and Gouda, California sausage with tomato and basil, Southwest sausage, whiskey fennel sausage.

The deli was another story. After two years, the low-volume traffic from McKinleyville — which was not only a graveyard for good restaurants but had traditionally supported some of the worst ones in the county — made the retail operation expendable, and the space was surrendered to storage for the ever-expanding processing operations.

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