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Sausage Dumplings
Take as many sausages as it is intended to make dumplings. Bend each one into a ring, and sew or skewer it in that position. Enclose it in good suet crust, pinch the edges securely to prevent leakage, and tie each dumpling in a separate cloth. When all are finished plunge the dumplings into a pan of boiling water, and boil quickly until done enough. Turn them out carefully, and serve at once. Brown sauce should be sent to table with them. Sausages dressed in this way are always liked by children. Time to boil the dumplings, half to three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 3d. each. Sufficient, one for each person.
A boiled suet pudding in miniature, one per person, with a raw sausage curled inside. The whole thing hinges on a watertight seal and a genuinely rolling boil.
- Suet crust proportionsThe recipe assumes a standard the reader already knows. A typical suet crust runs about 8 oz plain flour to 4 oz shredded beef suet, a little salt (and, in later versions, a teaspoon of baking powder), with roughly 5 fl oz cold water to a firm, just-tacky dough. Vegetable suet can be substituted; butter is a poorer choice for a long boil, as it tends to melt out of the crust.
- Sewing the ringBending the sausage into a ring presumably makes a compact parcel that sits neatly in the dough. The recipe allows skewering as well as sewing: a wooden cocktail stick through both ends, or a single loop of cotton kitchen twine, does the job faster than a needle and comes out easily at the table.
- The pudding clothA clean cotton cloth or square of muslin, scalded, wrung out and dusted generously with flour on the inside face, then tied with string leaving room for the crust to swell. Pleated baking parchment under foil, tied the same way, is the usual modern substitute, though the crust surface will not come out quite the same.
- "Boil quickly"This means a steady rolling boil, not a simmer, kept up without interruption. If the water goes off the boil the crust absorbs it and turns to paste, so keep a kettle on to top up with boiling water only.
- Timing and donenessHalf an hour is optimistic for a raw sausage sealed in dough. Give it the full three-quarters of an hour and check the sausage reaches 71C/160F at the centre; the crust will be cooked well before the meat is.
- Brown sauceNot bottled brown sauce. In this book it means a flour-and-dripping roux browned and let down with brown stock; a plain onion gravy answers the same purpose.
- Costs and yield"3d. each" is pre-decimal pence and of no use except as a marker of cheapness. One dumpling per person, as stated; they are filling, and a green vegetable is all they need alongside.
Boiled suet puddings tied in floured cloths were a mainstay of English cooking for well over two centuries, and by the time Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery appeared in the late Victorian period the technique was so ingrained that a book could simply say "enclose it in good suet crust" and expect to be understood. The appeal was economic as much as culinary: a cloth and one pot of boiling water fed a household without an oven, and suet was a cheap by-product of the butcher's block. This dish belongs to the nursery end of the repertoire -- sausages dressed in this way "are always liked by children", the book notes. The trick of bending a sausage into a ring so it sits neatly inside a round of dough is the sort of small domestic economy these dictionaries collected by the hundred.