Few foods carry as much civic weight as a sausage on a slice of bread. The sausage sizzle feeds school fetes, sports clubs and hardware store car parks across Australia, and on election days it appears outside polling stations so reliably that the Australian National Dictionary Centre made "democracy sausage" its word of the year in 2016. The format is fixed: one sausage, or snag, cooked on a hot plate, a pile of fried onions, a slice of soft white bread and a stripe of tomato sauce.

It is exactly what a crowd on a race weekend wants: cheap, hot, quick and eaten standing up. The only serious debate concerns the onions. One famous hardware chain asks its volunteers to put them under the sausage, not on top, so fewer end up on the ground. We find that this is excellent engineering and have adopted it.

The fried onions

Ingredients

• 3 large yellow onions
• 2 tablespoons (30 ml) vegetable oil
• 1/2 teaspoon fine salt

The sausages

Ingredients

• 8 thick beef or pork sausages
• 1 teaspoon (5 ml) vegetable oil

Building the sizzle

Ingredients

• 8 slices soft white sandwich bread
• 1/2 cup (120 ml) tomato sauce or ketchup
• barbecue sauce or yellow mustard

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