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Pork, Meat Cake Of
Mince separately one pound of lean pork and three-quarters of a pound of fat bacon. Mix them, and season the mixture rather highly with salt, pepper, cayenne, and chopped sage. Bind the ingredients together with the yolk of an egg. Form a round cake about an inch thick; dissolve a small portion of butter in a stewpan. Put in the cake, let it brown on one side, then turn it, and let it brown equally on the other. Put it on a hot dish, dredge a little flour into the butter, mix it to a smooth paste, thin it with a little stock, season with pepper and salt, and boil until it is of the consistency of cream; put in the cake, let it heat through, and serve with the sauce in the dish. If the flavour is liked, a little finely-minced onion may be added both to the cake and the sauce. Time to fry, from twelve to fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 1s. per pound. Sufficient for three persons.
A pan-fried pork patty of the plainest kind, finished in a quick pan gravy made in the same butter. The two things worth attention are the fat ratio and getting the middle cooked without burning the outside.
- "Fat bacon"In Victorian use this generally meant the fattest part of cured bacon, commonly green (unsmoked) rather than the smoked rashers sold today. Smoked supermarket bacon at this proportion will taste aggressively of cure and salt; ask a butcher for fatback or green streaky, or use fatty pork belly and cut the added salt back.
- The ratioOne pound lean to three-quarters pound fat bacon means the fat component is about 43 per cent of the mix by weight, richer than a modern sausage mix (the true fat content will differ, since fat bacon is not pure fat). It fries very well but renders a great deal into the pan. Two parts lean to one part fat gives a cake that still holds together and eats less heavily.
- Cook it throughMinced pork needs an internal 160F/71C throughout. A cake an inch thick browned in a pan will often hit 12–15 minutes as written, but check with a probe rather than trusting the clock; if the outside is colouring too fast, drop the heat and cover the pan.
- Keeping it in one pieceA single egg yolk is not much binder for nearly two pounds of meat. Chill the shaped cake for 20–30 minutes before it goes in the pan, and turn it once only, sliding two spatulas underneath from opposite sides.
- The sauce"Dredge a little flour into the butter" is a roux made in the frying fat — about a tablespoon of flour to the butter and rendered pork fat left in the pan. Cook it a minute before adding stock, and thin to pouring-cream consistency; it thickens further as it sits.
- Sage and cayenneSeason "rather highly" is meant literally, since fat mutes salt and pepper. Reckon on about a teaspoon and a half of salt for the full mix, a good pinch of cayenne, and a tablespoon of chopped fresh sage — dried sage at the same volume will overwhelm it, so use a third as much.
- Yield and cost"Sufficient for three persons" reflects a Victorian meat portion of roughly 8–10 oz of very rich mince. Cut as a shared cake with potatoes and a sharp green vegetable it will serve four. The "probable cost, 1s. per pound" is a price from the book's own period and has no bearing now.
The dish shows what a household did with minced meat at home: the same seasoning a butcher would put into skins — salt, pepper, sage, sometimes cayenne — bound with egg and fried loose as a cake. Sage with pork is an old and near-universal English pairing, generally explained by the herb's usefulness against rich fatty meat, and it survives in sage-and-onion stuffing and in Lincolnshire sausage. The construction of the sauce is equally characteristic of the period's economy: nothing is thrown away, and the flour goes straight into the fat left in the stewpan so that the browned residue of frying becomes the gravy. The optional minced onion, offered "if the flavour is liked," is a reminder that onion was still treated in some Victorian kitchens as a strong flavour to be asked about rather than assumed.