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Pork Sausages, Cooked
Pork sausages may be either baked, broiled, boiled, or fried. The usual way of cooking is to fry them: the best way is to bake them. To fry them: Put the sausages into a frying-pan over a clear fire with a little piece of butter in the pan to keep them from burning. Roll and turn them about that they may be equally cooked. The time required will depend upon the size of the sausages. If large, they will need twenty minutes; if small, ten or fifteen minutes will be enough. To bake sausages: Put them in a tin in a single layer, and place them in a moderate oven. Turn them over when they are half done, that they may be equally browned all over. The advantage of cooking sausages in this way is that they get cooked through, and are consequently much more wholesome. Time, one hour to one hour and a half. To broil sausages: Prick small sausages on both sides to keep them from bursting, and broil them till they are done enough. Serve on a hot dish. They will require from eight to twelve minutes. To boil sausages: Plunge them into boiling water, let them boil up, draw the saucepan to the side, and simmer gently for half an hour. Pork sausages should be served very hot, either on fresh toast or a mound of mashed potatoes. Brown sauce, apple sauce, or tomato sauce, may be sent to table with them. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
A survey of four methods rather than a single recipe, and the timings belong to a period when sausages were coarser, fatter and often considerably larger than the standard modern link. Judge by internal temperature rather than the clock.
- The hinge: cook to temperaturePork sausages are done at 160F (71C) in the centre. The book's insistence that baking is "more wholesome" is really an argument for cooking through, which a thermometer settles in seconds.
- A moderate ovenConventionally read today as about 350F (180C), though the book gives no temperature. At that heat a modern 2 oz link needs 25-35 minutes, turned once, not the hour to hour and a half given here; Victorian ovens rarely held a steady temperature.
- Frying timesTen to twenty minutes over a "clear fire" translates to medium heat, not high. Rushing the outside leaves a raw centre; the butter is there as insurance against scorching before the inside catches up.
- To prick or notThe text prescribes pricking only for broiling, and that is sound. Under a grill or on a griddle the skins tighten and split, so a few holes help; in a pan or oven, unpricked sausages keep more of their fat and stay juicier.
- BoilingHalf an hour of gentle simmering is longer than needed for a modern link and will produce a pale, slack skin. If you want them poached, finish briefly in a hot pan or under a grill for colour.
- Broiling means grillingIn a British book of this date, "broil" is cooking over the heat on a gridiron. An overhead grill or a ridged pan gives the same result; eight to twelve minutes is realistic for small links, turning often.
- CostThe book gives a probable cost of 1s. per pound. It carries no useful information for buying today.
- ServingToast or mashed potato with brown, apple or tomato sauce; a pound feeds three to four as a main dish. Serve them genuinely hot, as pork fat sets unpleasantly as it cools.
Sausages of this kind, sold by weight from the butcher and made from fresh unsmoked pork, fat and rusk or breadcrumb, are treated by Cassell's as a matter of method rather than of recipe: the cook bought them ready made and only had to decide how to apply heat. The word itself goes back through Old North French saussiche to Latin salsus, salted, a reminder that salting was originally the whole point, though a fresh pork sausage of this type is preserved for days rather than months. The book's preference for baking over frying is a small piece of period public-health thinking: undercooked pork was widely and correctly feared, and a long spell in the oven was the surest way an untrained kitchen could guarantee the centre was cooked. The pairing with apple sauce is the same logic that puts apple beside roast pork, generally traced in English cookery to the medieval habit of cutting rich fatty meat with something sharp.