The Breakfast Sausage King of Long Beach Island
Inside a Tiny Seasonal Grocery on an Island Off the Jersey Shore Is the Best Breakfast Sausage in New Jersey.
There it was. A small advertisement for White’s Market. Couldn’t have been one inch high by two inches wide. Just a few words about what the grocery had to offer. Sandwiches, cold cuts, produce. The usual. But at the end were three unusual words: homemade breakfast sausage.
Homemade breakfast sausage? I’ve heard of delis having specialities, things that set them apart from the other delis. But breakfast sausage? Who makes that their thing? Bacon, sure. But breakfast sausage?
The ad was in The Sandpaper, the only news organ on all of Long Beach Island, an 18-mile-long barrier island off the coast of central New Jersey. I was on the island visiting my parents-in-law and must have been bored stupid enough that I actually picked up The Sandpaper and started paging through it. The Sandpaper is one of those fake newspapers you find in resort communities. Such papers sort of publish the news, but not in so exactingly a fashion that they ruffle the feathers of the locals, who are a close-knit bunch and are really there only to relax and not be bothered by serious questions from journalists. Otherwise, it’s just a delivery system for ads for local vacation-oriented businesses and classifieds for yard sales. It’s a play newspaper, the kind of thing you can page through while on vacation, hum to yourself and think, “dum de dum, I’m perusing the local newspaper. What’s this? Clam bake fundraiser at the local firehouse next Sunday? Well, well.”
But, as anyone can tell you who’s spent enough time in a resort community, you can get addicted to the anodyne eccentricities of such publications, because they offer a window onto a quirky, inward-looking microcosm of society. And, yes, because the text within is never upsetting.
Long Beach Island used to be home to a bunch of Scandinavian fishermen and summer vacationers of modest means. Now it’s an enclave of the super rich, who threw up hundreds of McMansions on stilts after Hurricane Sandy laid waste to the place in 2012. But there are still a few vestiges of the old LBI around. Like White’s, a small grocery—really the only grocery—in Barnegat Light, a town at the northern tip of the island. White’s, which has been open since 1954, opens on Memorial Day and closes on Labor Day, after which it stays shut tighter than a drum until the next spring. It’s one of those resort community businesses that operates only in warm weather, after which the owners decamp to Florida for the rest of the year.
I’d been in White’s many times before when visiting LBI and hadn’t noticed anything remarkable about the place. But that breakfast sausage line had me intrigued. Perhaps White’s had been hiding its light under a bushel.
A little background on me and breakfast sausage. I love breakfast sausage. I will pick it over bacon, ham, steak, any other breakfast meat you care to mention. I grew up with it. I grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and we raised pigs. Yearly, they went to the slaughterhouse and came back as chops, bacon, ham and sausage. Our massive freezer in the basement was always full of meat, the provenance of which I knew exactly. And the link breakfast sausage was of great quality, flavorful with just the right balance of spices.
Sausage is a pretty major food group in Wisconsin. But it’s somewhat limited in scope, dominated by the traditional links of the immigrant groups that settled the state in the early 19th century, the bratwurst of the Germans, and the Polish sausage and Kielbasa of the Polish. When I moved to New York, I encountered a wider world of sausage, chorizo and Italian sausage and andouille and boudin and bangers and soppressata. However, breakfast sausage did not seem to be a thing New York worried itself over much. Bacon reigned supreme. People got all worked up about what the best bacon was, who served it and where to get it. There was no such culinary fervor over breakfast sausage.
Breakfast sausage’s origins are old and rustic. In her 2013 book Breakfast, Heather Arndt Anderson writes:
Although Europeans had perfected sausage-making over the millennia, the first to be specifically called breakfast sausage did not begin popping up in American and English cookbooks and ladies’ magazines until the end of the 19th century. The addition of sage to the uncured port distinguishes breakfast sausage then, just as it does today, but it is unclear why; perhaps the strong flavor of sage helped mask the orders of meat going bad without refrigeration, or the antibacterial effects of the aromatic mint relative could have prevented illness. Breakfast sausage, or country sausage, as it is also known in the United States, has remained an important source of protein in a traditional farmer’s breakfast.
My wife recently bought an old book called New Process Catalogue Cook Book. It was published in 1894 and has recipes for just about everything, including sausage. The recipe for sausage is obviously for breakfast sausage, as it is made with pork and calls for only salt, sage, black pepper and a touch of cayenne.
Intrigued by the ad in The Sandpaper, I went to White’s and walked straight to the butcher counter at the back. I scanned the case. There it was, to the far right. “White’s Famous Breakfast Sausage.” Five dollars a pound. It wasn’t sausage links, though, like I expected. Every New York butcher I’ve ever gone to that had breakfast sausage sold it as links. White’s’ was a large mound of what looked like ground beef. You bought it by the pound and formed it into patties yourself at home.
White’s was weird. Nice.
I bought a pound, not expecting much. Ninety-nine percent of the foods that businesses say they are “famous” for turn out to be nondescript and unremarkable. I took the meat home, formed it into patties the next morning and had it with eggs. It was unaccountabley fantastic. There was the sage you expect, but also some spices I couldn’t identify, and a hint of heat, but not too much, at the end.
According to Michael White, who runs the store, White’s has been selling the breakfast sausage since it opened in 1954. The tradition was either started by his father, who founded the store, or his father’s butcher at the time. They used a commercial spice mix to season the meat. Which mix, they won’t say.
Mr. White told me he knows some people on LBI who grilled the sausage up like burgers and eat it on a bun. He doesn’t put much stock in such nonsense.
After my initial purchase, I quickly bought more breakfast sausage. Much more. Then I began to fret over the idea that for nine months of the year you couldn’t get White’s breakfast sausage. So I hatched a plan to buy several pounds of it on Labor Day weekend and freeze it so it would last through the winter.
I wasn’t the only person who had that idea.
I went to White’s on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend and the sausage was gone. In it’s place was a hand-written note: “There will be no more White’s famous breakfast sausage until next spring.”
In what world is there a run on breakfast sausage?
White’s makes five to six hundred pounds of breakfast sausage during its final week in business every summer. And it isn’t enough. (I’ve noticed the popularity of the sausage go up in recent years. Every year, White’s makes more sausage during its final week, and every year they sell out. I’ve also noticed the price go up. A pound is now $7.)
I haven’t made that mistake since. I visit White’s early on the Friday of Labor Day weekend and buy my store for the winter.
Odds and Ends…
Brooklyn Hots, the Brooklyn eatery that celebrates the food traditions of Rochester, New York, has added a vegan garbage plate to their menu. Also, on Tuesday, June 28, Chef Adam Gourchane from Speedy Romeo will make a guest appearance as part of a fundraiser for the National Network of Abortion Funds. A $25 minimum donation gets you a fried chicken sandwich with Mac & cheese. Drinks are also available for an additional donation. The event begins at 6 p.m… The Spirits Awards of Tales of the Cocktail named Harry’s New York Bar in Paris and Bemelmans Bar in New York as this year’s recipients of the Timeless Awards, which honors classic cocktail bars that have some years on them… My feature story on birch beer for Imbibe magazine is now available to read online… Harrison Greene and Anthony Fiacco (Grand Banks, Lanterns Keep, Little Branch) will open up a new spot on 337 West Broadway called Mezcal & Amaro and the focus will be, yes, mezcal and amaro. It will open in late August… Hidden Harbor, the tiki bar in Pittsburgh, will launch its Tiki Road Trip menu on June 28. It is described as “a guided tour through 15 of the finest modern tropical drinks.”… Peter Genovese, New Jersey’s tireless food reporter. has published his 2022 list of Jersey Shore restaurants he recommends you visit this summer.
The Breakfast Sausage King of Long Beach Island
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I’m a breakfast sausage fan myself. I just spent 2 weekends in Wildwood NJ. I didn’t have time between the Tiki fests I work at there to travel up the coast, as I have in the past. But hopefully next year I’ll have time to visit and grab some. Thanks for the tip!!