Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pork Sausages, Without Skins
Pork Sausages, Without Skins
Prepare the sausages according to the directions already given (see PORK SAUSAGES); and when the ingredients are thoroughly mixed, bind them together with two or three well-beaten eggs. Make them into small rolls, egg and bread-crumb them, and fry them over a clear fire until they are nicely browned. Send good brown gravy to table with them. Time to fry, ten to fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
A skinless sausage in all but name: seasoned pork forcemeat bound with egg, crumbed and shallow-fried. The recipe is a cross-reference, so the seasoning comes from the book's main PORK SAUSAGES entry, and the only real difficulty is getting the rolls cooked through without burning the crumb.
- The base mixtureVictorian pork sausage meat is generally lean pork to fat somewhere around two to one, minced fine and seasoned with salt, pepper and sage; the exact proportions and seasoning here depend on the book's PORK SAUSAGES entry, which is not reproduced on this page. Modern sausage meat from a butcher works directly; supermarket sausages squeezed from their casings also work, though they are usually wetter and will need extra crumb.
- Egg as binderThe recipe gives no weight of meat, so the two or three eggs may be intended for a batch larger than a pound. Read as two or three eggs to the pound it is generous by current practice and would give a soft, almost quenelle-like mixture. Start with one egg per pound, chill the mixture for half an hour, and add more only if the rolls will not hold shape.
- "A clear fire"This means glowing coals with no smoke or flame, the Victorian equivalent of steady medium heat; the book gives no temperature. Too hot and the crumb colours long before the pork is safe.
- Time and donenessTen to fifteen minutes is right for rolls about the size of a thumb, but judge by temperature, not clock: pork forcemeat should reach 71C/160F at the centre. Larger rolls will brown outside and stay pink within.
- Egg and breadcrumbThe standard sequence is a light dusting of flour, then beaten egg, then dry fine crumbs. Flour is not mentioned here but the coating adheres far better with it, particularly on a wet, egg-bound mixture.
- The gravy"Good brown gravy" in Victorian cookery generally means a stock-based gravy thickened with browned flour and butter rather than pan drippings; the book's own gravy entry is not given here. Deglazing the frying pan with stock and a spoon of flour gives a similar effect with less work.
- YieldA pound of sausage meat makes roughly twelve small rolls, enough for four as a main course with potatoes, or six as part of a larger meal.
- The cost note1s. per pound is a late-Victorian retail figure and has no modern equivalent worth calculating; it appears throughout Cassell's as a guide for household budgeting, not as a price you can convert.
Skinless sausages appear in Victorian cookery books for a practical reason: casings were the awkward part. Cleaning and filling hog or sheep gut needed equipment, skill and a strong stomach, and ready-made sausages could be bought from a butcher instead. Recipes like this one let a cook make the seasoned meat at home, controlling how much sage went in — and skip the casing entirely, using egg and a crumb coat to hold the shape instead. The technique is the same one behind croquettes and rissoles, which appear elsewhere in Cassell's, and the finished rolls sit somewhere between a sausage and a fried forcemeat ball. Sage with pork is a long-established English pairing, older than this book, and remains the default seasoning in British sausage meat.