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Garnish, Chipolata For
Cut up one pound of fresh pork and one pound of bacon; remove all skin and gristle. Add pepper and salt to taste, and a tea-spoonful each of pounded sage, allspice, and cloves. Pass the meat twice through a sausage machine. Wash carefully some sausage skins about three-quarters of an inch in diameter, and fill them with the mince, dividing them into little sausages not more than two inches long. Prick them in two or three places with a needle; put them in a shallow frying-pan with a little butter, and cook from twelve to fifteen minutes, turning them well to cook them evenly. These are usually served with roasted or braised turkey. Probable cost, 10d. per pound.
This is a sausage-making recipe in miniature: two pounds of forcemeat piped into narrow casings and fried as a garnish for turkey. The hinge is the fat balance — bacon is doing the work that back fat would do in a modern chipolata, so use a fatty piece rather than lean rashers.
- Meat and fatOne pound fresh pork and one pound bacon gives roughly the 25-30% fat a sausage needs, but only if the bacon is genuinely fatty streaky or belly. With modern lean back bacon, substitute unsmoked pork belly or add 4 oz hard back fat, or the sausages will be dry and crumbly.
- Salt and cureBacon is already salted and often nitrite-cured, so season the mixture lightly and fry a teaspoonful as a tester before filling any casings. Expect the finished sausages to have a faintly pink, ham-like cast from the cured half.
- The spicingA teaspoonful each of ground cloves and allspice in two pounds of meat is assertive by current taste, and cloves in particular dominate quickly. Half that is closer to a modern chipolata; the sage can stay as written.
- CasingsThree-quarters of an inch is sheep casing, the standard chipolata gauge, sold salt-packed from butchers and online. Soak in cool water for at least 30 minutes and rinse the interior before filling. Hog casings, at about 1 1/4 inches, are too coarse here.
- GrindingTwice through, as directed. Keep meat, fat and grinder parts near-freezing; if the fat smears and the mixture looks greasy rather than sticky, it will render out in the pan.
- PrickingYou can skip it: a well-filled sheep casing cooked over moderate heat will not burst, and needle holes simply let the juices and fat escape.
- CookingTwelve to fifteen minutes in butter over medium heat suits two-inch links and brings them to the 160F/71C the pork needs. They can equally be roasted at 400F for 15 minutes, turned once, which is easier if you are already cooking a turkey.
- Yield and costTwo pounds of forcemeat in sheep casings makes several dozen two-inch links -- a garnish for a large bird with plenty over. The "probable cost, 10d. per pound" is late-Victorian retail pricing and belongs to the book's habit of costing every dish for the household accounts.
Chipolata reaches English cookery through French, which took it from the Italian cipollata, a dish flavoured with onions (cipolla). In nineteenth-century French practice a garniture à la chipolata was a composed assembly for roast poultry and braised meats — glazed button onions, chestnuts, lardons of bacon, sometimes mushrooms, and small sausages — and in English use it is that last element which came to carry the name. Here the word still attaches to a garnish, though the garnish has been reduced to the sausages alone and the onions have dropped out of it. Its placement among the garnishes rather than the meat dishes is telling: this is trimming for the turkey, part of the elaborate dressing of a set-piece roast that a well-run Victorian kitchen was expected to produce from scratch, sausage machine and all.