Sausages should be a positive influence on your day. You don’t eat them for their health-giving benefits. You don’t eat them because you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about where they’ve come from. You don’t eat them because you’re pushing the boundaries of experimental gastronomy.

No. You eat sausages because there is something simple and comforting about them. They’re a guilty pleasure. They can be mostly breadcrumb and fat, or they can be as gourmet as a tube of innards stuffed with mashed up bits of other innards can feasibly be. But, one way or another, you kind of know what you’re getting. They should bring joy, even if only a bit. These are no pleasure, only guilt.

All of which is important context, I feel, for why I’m writing this.

Yesterday, I cooked some Porky White’s Premium Nduja Inspired Sausages. The following thoughts are based on a single bite of one and are not intended to represent anything other than my own opinions.

It was – by quite a remarkable margin – the most foul, upsetting thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. I immediately put it out of my mouth, then binned the rest.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “but, Mr Blogman, as someone who intermittently writes nonsense on the internet, I can only assume you must be a gourmand of the highest calibre!” This, I’m afraid, not quite the case. I think it important that I set a benchmark, so that anyone reading this understand quite how violated they will feel if they eat these sausages.

Once, when I was at university, I ate pasta made with air freshener and Daz, for a bet. A few years later, I had food poisoning every single weekend for six months because I couldn’t help myself eating the plague-ridden chicken burgers of a certain Bristolian late-night takeaway, simply because it was the closest one to my favourite pub. I have even – and I need you to know I’m not proud of this – eaten more than one of those microwave doner kebabs that were doing the rounds about 15 years ago.

The bar is not high, is what I’m trying to get across.

And, for the record, I really like Nduja. Love it. If I go to a restaurant and anything on the menu contains Nduja, I will likely order it. So to say that these sausages are ‘inspired by’ Nduja is akin to saying that Hitler was inspired by the Talmud.

But what did they taste like?

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer, as most people don’t often – certainly not willingly – eat the kinds of things that I assume taste like Porky White’s Premium Nduja Inspired Sausages.

I have never licked the toilet of a leper colony in the midst of a cholera epidemic, for example. I don’t know what minced Shoggoth packed into rhino foreskin tastes like. Disappointment is an abstract concept, too intangible for me to chew on.

But these are my starting points. If I were to guess at the recipe, I’d assume it’s something along the lines of:

1. Develop tertiary syphilis
2. Overcook some quorn mince
3. Add an equal quantity of stomach bile, a dash of tobasco, and reduce
4. Put the resultant mush into an old sleeping bag
5. Leave to cure for 19 years
6. Set yourself on fire

I don’t know enough about sewage processing to speculate further, but that’s probably as good a starting point as any vaguely sane mind can come up with.

The skin is thick and chewy. This is perhaps a defensive measure, but also could be because it’s made from the sun-dried scrotum of an elephant with mange. It’s like someone tried to make jerky out of Suella Braverman’s herpes; weathered and bitter. If you laminated a crocodile, it’d have less bite than this.

Unfortunately, the skin isn’t quite thick enough to represent the full mass of the sausage, nor prevent you accessing the rest of the sausage, and what’s inside is somehow even worse. There have been things pulled out of rivers by police forensics units which have a better texture than the inside of Porky White’s Premium Nduja Inspired Sausages. And the texture is far superior to the taste.

This is where my eclectic and occasionally creative vocabulary falls short.

Presumably, like all modern mass-produced foodstuffs, these were taste-tested. I can only assume the people involved in this process had never tried eating before. Or perhaps I misread the cooking instructions and missed the step which says “get someone else to eat them first”. Either way, what happens in the middle is not good.

I don’t mean not good like stubbing your toe or finding out you left your phone at the pub. I mean not good like “I guess I’ll be at The Hague soon, then,” or being diagnosed with Exploding Bones Syndrome. When the team at Porky Whites laid out the instructions for flavour, I can only assume it was “make them taste like the last third of the film Event Horizon, then add sick.”

I managed one bite, which I had to spit out. At first, for a moment, I thought I’d trapped the nerve in every single one of my taste buds. If I were a Sausage Sommelier – which should be a job if it isn’t already, these forsaken abominations aside – then my tasting notes would read:

• Opens with overtones of cystitis and crippling anxiety
• Hints of toenail and scrofula
• Finishes with a lingering sense of dread

You would get better results if you partially froze the output of a vigorous colonic irrigation and decanted it directly into a volcano, and then ate that.

Hopefully this feedback is useful, both to unwitting consumers and the deranged sadists at Porky Whites’ tasting facility. Which I must assume is somewhere in the deepest bowels of something. Probably a very ill goat that has spent many years as a test subject at Porton Down.

No stars out of any, should be a hate crime.