Home › The Principles of Cookery › BOLOGNA SAUSAGE (another way)
BOLOGNA SAUSAGE (another way)
Take a pound of lean beef or veal, a pound of bacon, rather fat, a pound of beef suet, and a pound of lean pork. Chop up very small all together, with a handful of sage leaves and a few sweet herbs; season to taste with salt and pepper, and press into a large, clean sausage-skin. Put the sausage into a saucepan of boiling water, and prick it over to prevent bursting. Boil for an hour. Probable cost, 10d. to 1s. per pound.
A four-pound cooked sausage of the plainest sort: no cure, no smoke, just chopped meat and fat in a casing, poached. The whole thing hinges on the water never actually boiling.
- Do not boil itDespite the instruction, a rolling boil renders the fat, swells the forcemeat and splits the skin no matter how much you prick it. Bring the pan to a boil, slide the sausage in, then drop the heat and hold the water at a bare shiver, around 175-180F, for the hour.
- DonenessAn hour at that temperature will take a sausage of ordinary thickness (2-3 in) to a safe centre, but check with a probe: 160F in the middle. A very fat beef bung casing may need longer.
- Salt, since "to taste" is no help rawWeigh it. For 4 lb of meat and fat, 1 to 1 1/4 oz of salt (roughly 1.5-2 percent) is the working range for sausage; less and it tastes flat and the texture stays crumbly.
- Beef suetSuet is hard kidney fat and it sets waxy on the tongue when cold. Pork fat gives a far better mouthfeel and is what continental mortadella uses; if you keep the suet, eat the sausage warm.
- Chopping"Chop up very small" meant a bowl and a hand chopper. A food processor in short pulses does it, but everything, meat and fat and bowl, must be near freezing or the fat smears and the sausage turns greasy and grainy.
- The casingA "large, clean sausage-skin" is a beef middle or a beef bung, both sold by butchers and online sausage suppliers, packed in salt and needing a soak and a rinse. Tie both ends firmly and leave a little slack; a tightly stuffed casing is the other main cause of bursting.
- A handful of sageTake that as a small handful of fresh leaves, finely shredded. Sage is assertive and dominates this mixture quickly; "sweet herbs" in period cookery usually meant some combination of thyme, marjoram, savory and parsley.
- KeepingThis is a fresh cooked sausage, not a cured keeping one. Cool it quickly, refrigerate, and eat within three or four days, or freeze. Yield is about 4 lb, enough for 12-16 as a cold cut.
- The price10d. to 1s. a pound is Victorian money, of the kind the book gives throughout as a rough guide to what the dish costs. It tells you nothing useful about quantities.
Cassell's is a dictionary, so it collects variants rather than adjudicating between them, and this is the plain English version of a name borrowed from Italy. True Bologna sausage is the ancestor of mortadella: a cooked sausage of finely pounded pork studded with cubes of fat. What crossed the Channel became something else entirely, a large boiled sausage of mixed meats seasoned with sage, and "polony", a word still attached to cheap pink boiling sausage in Britain, South Africa and Australia, is generally traced to an English alteration of the name. The recipe's equal-weight formula of beef or veal, bacon, suet and pork is often said to reflect Victorian household cookery, where a sausage was a way of using up several small pieces at once and stretching them with fat, and the note of probable cost per pound tells you the book expected its reader to be weighing that economy carefully.