Veal Sausages
Take equal quantities of fat bacon and lean veal. Season with sage, salt and pepper, to the taste, and if convenient, an anchovy. Chop well and mix together; make into cakes and fry.
A skinless sausage — forcemeat patties, cooked straight in the pan with no casing to fuss over. The proportions are the whole recipe, so measure them rather than guessing.
- What "fat bacon" meansNot modern thin-sliced smoked breakfast bacon but the fat cut of cured pork — fatback or fat salt pork, mostly white with little lean. Green (unsmoked) bacon may sit closer to the balance intended here; heavily smoked streaky bacon will dominate the veal.
- Equal quantities by weightTake it as weight, not volume: 8 oz veal to 8 oz pork fat makes eight small cakes. That is a very rich mix by modern habit, and cutting the fat to a third of the total still fries and holds together well.
- Salt from the porkFatback and salt pork are already salted, and the anchovy adds more. Season lightly, fry a teaspoon of the mixture, taste it, then adjust the rest.
- The anchovyOne oil-packed fillet or half a teaspoon of anchovy paste for a pound of meat. Mash it to nothing first — a stray lump reads as a mistake rather than as seasoning.
- Sage quantityAbout a tablespoon of chopped fresh sage, or a rounded teaspoon dried, per pound. Sage this is meant to taste of, but dried sage turns dusty and bitter if overdone.
- Chopping versus grinding"Chop well" meant a knife or a chopping bowl, which leaves the texture coarse and pleasantly uneven. A grinder on the coarse plate is the nearest equivalent; a food processor will paste the veal if you let it run, so pulse in short bursts and keep everything cold.
- FryingMedium heat in a dry or barely greased pan — the pork fat renders out and does the work. Flatten to about half an inch, 4 to 5 minutes a side, and cook right through to 160F, as with any ground pork and veal.
- YieldA pound of mixture gives eight cakes, enough for four. They fry best from the fridge after an hour's rest, which firms the fat and helps them hold shape.
Sausages made without casings and fried as cakes were a familiar household practice long before the term "sausage patty" existed; recipes of this kind appear throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery, where the mixture was shaped by hand. Sage is long-established among English sausage seasonings, and the anchovy belongs to a Georgian and Victorian habit of using salted fish as a background savour in meat dishes — the same instinct behind anchovy in beef gravies and in bottled sauces. Veal was the blander partner here, needing both the pork fat for succulence and the anchovy for depth. The offhand "if convenient" tells you something about the period kitchen: anchovies came in a pot or a bottle, kept well, and were treated as an optional store-cupboard improvement rather than a purchase to be made for the dish.