So how many ways are there to describe a sausage roll?
GREGGS may be a North East company but the effects of its advent calendar blunder this week were heard around the world.
A sausage roll at the centre of a Nativity scene might have seemed like a cute idea for a picture in an advent calendar.
But although some defended it as a joke, many people took offence at the image and said it disrespected religion.
The bakery apologised but as the story made its way around the world, reporters outside the North East were confronted with the task of explaining a Greggs sausage roll to their readers.
The story took off in the US, where many Twitter users mocked USA Today’s description of the sausage roll as ‘the popular delicacy’ and ‘a pastry wrapped around sausage meat’, perhaps feeling that ‘delicacy’ went too far.
Elegant variations in the New York Times included ‘a fatty snack’ and ‘the sausage roll saviour’, featuring the story ‘Sausage Roll Jesus Creates Heartburn for U.K. Bakery Firm’ on page 9 of Friday’s edition, a version of which was also used by the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times told its readers the calendar was ‘a departure from the chain’s usual baked goods, sandwiches and hot drinks’, and technology website The Register took inspiration from The Simpsons, channelling Homer Simpson with the headline ‘Mmm, sacrilicious’.
The far-right website Breitbart, whose founder Steve Bannon is an ally of President Trump, picked up the story too, although incorrectly described the company as Yorkshire-based.
And in mainland Europe, the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung described the offending pastry as a hot dog, with the headline ‘Calls for boycott of British bakery because of hot dog in the crib’, while a Danish newspaper referred to them as Pølsehorn, meaning American-style pigs in blankets, which are closer to British sausage rolls.
Still, it was perhaps for the best that the controversy did not involve pasties. The Washington Post had to clarify in 2014, in a story about Greggs being the victim of a Google prank, that the word meant ‘a savoury pastry in Britain, not a stripper’s nipple cover’.