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Utopenci (Pickled Sausages Stuffed with Onion)

Name: Utopenci (Pickled Sausages Stuffed with Onion)
Prep time: 25 min
Cook time: 5 min
Total time: 30 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Czech
Ingredients: 8 špekáček (Czech smoked sausage); 3 onions; 600 ml water; 300 ml vinegar (5-6%); 3 tbsp sugar; 1 tbsp salt; 12 black peppercorns; 8 whole allspice; 2 hot chillies; 2 gherkins; 4 slices rye bread

The Czech pub snack eaten cold with beer: smoked špekáček sausages, peeled and slit lengthwise, stuffed with onion and left in a boiled-and-cooled brine of vinegar, water, salt, sugar, pepper and allspice for a week, better two, somewhere cold. It is a cooked meat soaked afterwards, but both the brine and the sausage are cold, so the route by which a cooling food drinks its liquid is closed. What is left is the knife and time.

Steps

Bring the water, vinegar, sugar, salt, peppercorns and allspice to the boil. Once the sugar and salt have dissolved, boil 2 minutes more and take it off the heat.
⏲ 2 min
Let the brine cool completely. It does not go on hot.
Peel the sausages. Nick the casing at one end and it pulls away. Slit each peeled sausage lengthwise, leaving the underside joined. Halve them if they are long.
Pack the slits tightly with the chopped onion.
Line a clean jar with sliced onion and layer in the sausages and the rest of the onion, with the chillies and gherkins if using.
Pour on the cold brine so the sausages are completely covered. Finish with onion on top so nothing floats clear.
Close the jar and refrigerate for at least a week, better two.
Serve cold, with plenty of the onion from the jar, rye bread and beer.

Variations

Other vegetables in the jar: hot peppers, gherkins and cabbage are common; they are the optional lines above.
In the brine: some add mustard, ketchup, Worcestershire or soy sauce.
Quick utopenci: a shortened soak exists too. Why the full version takes its time is in the tips.

More detail and the reasons why (2)

The name: Czech utopenec means a drowned man, and utopenci is the plural. Czech Wikipedia credits a publican and miller named Šamánek with inventing them and gives two stories for the name: that he drowned while mending his mill wheel, or simply that the sausages are drowned in the brine.
The sausage: a špekáček is a Czech smoked sausage of finely chopped pork and beef with cubes of smoked back fat, in beef casing. A thick smoked sausage with fat through it is the nearest substitute.

Tips

Still, cold. Czech Wikipedia's condition is at least a week, better two, somewhere cool. This recipe makes that the fridge.
Keep them under. Whatever sticks out of the brine does not take on flavour for the whole time. Weigh the top down with onion.
The sugar in the brine is there against the vinegar. It rounds off the sharpness, and sweet-sour is what sits beside the fat of the sausage (balancing flavour).

More detail and the reasons why (3)

A cooked meat soaked afterwards, without the advantage that route usually brings. What marinades do gives soaking-after-cooking its own section: leave something cooked sitting in liquid and, "as it cools and contracts, it draws that liquid inward." Oden is built on it. The word doing the work is cools. Here the brine is boiled and then cooled before it goes on, and the sausage is cold. Nothing is cooling, so nothing is drawing liquid in.
So the knife does that job. The same guide states the limit — "Cut into meat marinated overnight and the colour reaches one to three millimetres in." — and says the way past it is surface, not time: "Past the limit, time returns nothing and surface returns in proportion." Taking the casing off and slitting the sausage lengthwise both add surface for the brine to work on, and the onion packed into the slit holds that surface open.
The vinegar is in the jar from the start. Fermentation basics draws the line after the risky first days of a ferment: "Where the acid is in the jar from the first minute there is no competition to rig and no window to survive, and the levers below stop being what governs." In pikliz's words, "The acid is brought in, not made". So the week is not spent waiting for anything to ferment; it is spent taking on flavour, and an early taste tells you, in the guide's words, that "in a bottled-acid jar it is only a jar that is not yet flavoured."