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BEEF SAUSAGES (Home Made)
Remove all the skin and gristle from two pounds of lean beef, and mince it very finely with one pound and a half of good fresh suet; add, as a seasoning, one tea-spoonful of powdered sage, the same of thyme and allspice, with salt and pepper to taste; fill thoroughly clean skins, and boil as directed for black puddings. Time, half an hour to boil. Probable cost for this quantity, about 3s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain Victorian fresh sausage, seasoned dry and poached rather than fried. Two things need attention before you start: the fat ratio and the word "boil".
- Never let it boilDespite the wording, treat this as a gentle poach: water held just below a simmer, the sausages lowered in and cooked slowly. A rolling boil renders the suet out and splits the casings.
- The suet ratio is very highA pound and a half of suet to two pounds of beef is roughly 43 per cent fat. Modern taste sits better at 25-30 per cent, which means about three-quarters of a pound of fat to two pounds of meat.
- Suet substitutionsFresh beef suet from a butcher is the intended article; packaged shredded suet contains flour and will not do. Beef fat trimmings or pork back fat, both well chilled, mince more cleanly than suet, which tends to smear.
- MincingChill meat and fat until firm before they go through the plate. The book asks for a very fine mince, so a second pass or a finer plate is in keeping with it; work quickly and keep everything cold so the fat does not smear.
- Skins"Thoroughly clean skins" now means salted hog casings, rinsed and soaked in cool water for half an hour, then flushed through. Do not prick them before poaching, which is exactly how the fat escapes.
- Seasoning by weightA teaspoon each of sage, thyme and allspice across three and a half pounds of mixture is restrained. Salt should be measured rather than guessed: 1.5 to 2 per cent of the total weight, or about 25-30 g for this batch. Fry a small patty to taste before filling the casings.
- Timing and donenessHalf an hour is generous for a sausage of ordinary thickness; work to an internal temperature of 160F, which a 1-inch sausage will reach in about 20 minutes at a gentle poach.
- Finishing and yieldPoached sausages are pale. Cool them, then brown briefly in a dry pan or under a grill. The stated four or five servings is realistic given the richness.
- The cost note"About 3s." is three shillings in pre-decimal currency; the book gave a probable cost for most receipts. It carries no useful modern equivalent.
Cassell's places this among household economies rather than luxuries: the point of a home-made sausage was control of what went into it, at a time when commercial sausages had a poor reputation for adulteration with bread, water and worse, and when the Victorian press regularly ran scandals about butchers' meat. Beef sausages are often associated with northern England and Scotland, in contrast with the pork sausage of the south, and beef fat and suet were everyday cooking fats in many British kitchens; suet is beef kidney fat, firm enough to mince and slow to melt, which is why it appears here in such quantity. Boiling rather than frying is the treatment given here, shared with black pudding and other filled skins, and it produced a sausage that could be sliced cold or browned as wanted. Sage and thyme with allspice is a seasoning pattern recognisable in English sausage-making, and still in commercial mixes today.