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Beef Sausages
Clear the beef and suet from all skin, bone, and gristle; take two pounds of lean beef to one pound of suet, add salt, pepper, and mixed spice, and shallots, or any other tasty condiment, according to liking, chop very fine and mix well together. Some cooks prefer to pound the whole in a mortar, but if the meat is well minced this is needless. Roll the meat into sausages and fry until they become a nice brown colour, and serve in the usual way, with mashed potatoes round the dish. They are more delicate if pressed into skins. It is worth notice that all meat cooked with the skin retains its original flavour, and is much preferred by connoisseurs. Time to fry, ten to twelve minutes. Probable cost, 2s. 6d.
A plain fresh sausage mixture with no fixed seasoning quantities, meant to be fried the day it is made. Two things carry it: the 2:1 lean-to-fat ratio and keeping everything cold.
- The ratio is the recipeTwo pounds lean beef to one pound suet is roughly 33% fat, which is high by modern sausage standards but correct here — beef is much drier than pork and a leaner mix fries out grey and crumbly. Chuck or shin is the right cut for the lean.
- SuetAsk a butcher for fresh beef suet, not the boxed shredded suet sold for pastry, which is usually blended with flour or palm oil and will not mince properly. If you cannot get it, beef fat trimmed from a brisket point works.
- Keep it coldChill the meat and fat until firm, near freezing, before mincing or chopping. Warm suet smears rather than cutting, and smeared fat leaks out in the pan and leaves the sausage dry.
- "Mixed spice"In a British book of this date this means the sweet baking blend — allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, clove, sometimes coriander and ginger. For 3 lb of mixture, start at about 1½ teaspoons salt per pound (roughly 2 per cent), 1 teaspoon black pepper and 1 teaspoon mixed spice total, then fry a teaspoon of the mix to taste it before shaping.
- Skinless sausages need help"Roll the meat into sausages" gives you nothing to hold them together. Work the seasoned mince hard with a spoon or your hands for a minute until it turns tacky and begins to cling to the bowl, then chill the shaped sausages for 30 minutes before frying. A tablespoon or two of fine breadcrumbs soaked in cold water per pound is period-appropriate insurance.
- Frying timeTen to twelve minutes in a moderately hot pan is about right for a sausage of ordinary thickness, turned often. Beef mince should reach 160F/71C at the centre; too fierce a heat splits the casing and drives the fat out before the middle is done.
- CasingsThe note that they are "more delicate" pressed into skins is sound — the casing holds the juices in. Natural hog casings, sold salted, need a good rinse and an hour's soak in cold water before use.
- Yield and costThree pounds of mixture makes about a dozen sausages, enough for six with the mashed potato. The 2s. 6d. is the whole batch, not a portion.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was a household encyclopaedia generally placed in the later Victorian period, arranged alphabetically and aimed at cooks working to a budget, which is why nearly every entry ends with a probable cost. Beef sausages sat below pork in the hierarchy but had a real constituency: they suited households that avoided pork altogether. The addition of suet is not economy but necessity, since beef carries far less intramuscular fat than pork, and the sweet "mixed spice" seasoning is an old English habit that ran through sausages, forcemeats and mincemeat alike well into the nineteenth century. The aside about meat cooked in its skin retaining flavour reflects a period conviction, widely repeated in kitchen manuals of the day, that a sealed surface held the juices in eing since since complicated, though the practical result with a sausage casing is real enough.