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Sausage Fritters
Mince finely one and a half pounds of pork, season with pepper and salt, add a few bread-crumbs, and blend together with a beaten egg. Make the mixture into little flat cakes, egg and bread-crumb them, and fry in boiling fat for eight minutes. Probable cost, 1s.
A plain forcemeat cake, essentially a homemade sausage patty with a crumb coat. The only real variables are the fat temperature and the thickness of the cakes.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" means fat at frying heat, around 350-375F, not literally boiling. Below that the crumb coat soaks rather than seals; much above it and the crust colours before the pork is cooked through.
- Cake thickness governs the timingThe book gives no size, but eight minutes suits fairly thin cakes, on the order of half an inch thick. Thicker patties will brown outside and stay pink inside, so keep them flat and even, and take the pork to 160F.
- The pork itselfPeriod pork mince was generally fattier than modern lean mince, which at the low end will give a dry, crumbly fritter. Ask for shoulder or belly minced, or add a few ounces of minced fatty pork to lean.
- Seasoning quantitiesThe book leaves pepper and salt open. For 1.5 lb of pork, about 1.5 teaspoons of fine salt and a teaspoon of black pepper is a reasonable starting point. Sage, mace or nutmeg are common in English pork seasoning and are not out of place here.
- Breadcrumbs in the mix"A few" means enough to bind, not to bulk: two to three tablespoons of dry crumbs for this quantity. More turns the fritter into a rissole.
- Egg and crumbChill the shaped cakes for twenty minutes before coating. Cold, firm patties hold the crumb and do not slump when they hit the fat.
- Yield and servingAbout eight to ten cakes, serving four. Fried apple rings, mashed potato or a sharp gravy all suit; so does mustard.
- The cost noteOne shilling is the price of the whole dish in late-Victorian money, not a measurement. Ignore it except as a period detail.
The cake is essentially a sausage without the casing, plausibly made when a household had mince and no skins. Sausage-making at home was a winter and pig-killing job. The egg-and-breadcrumb coating is a standard nineteenth-century treatment for anything about to meet deep fat, and recurs elsewhere in the dictionary applied to fish, croquettes and cutlets alike. The bare seasoning, pepper and salt only, is common in English pork cookery of the period, though plenty of contemporary recipes do print sage or mace.