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SAUSAGE-MEAT CAKES (another way)
Take two or more pounds of good sausage-meat. Press it into a buttered dish, and bake in a gentle oven. When done enough, turn it cut, and send it to table with a little gravy round it, and more in a tureen. If preferred, the cake may be steamed over boiling water instead of being baked. Time to bake, one hour or more. Probable cost, 10d. per pound.
A plain baked loaf of sausage meat, closer to a terrine than to a cake. The recipe leaves almost everything to judgement, so the useful additions are a temperature, a time and a doneness test.
- Gentle ovenRead this as somewhere around 300-325F (150-160C). Sausage meat is fatty and a hotter oven drives the fat out before the centre sets, leaving a dry, crumbly loaf.
- DonenessAn hour is right for a 2 lb loaf in a deep dish, but go by internal temperature rather than the clock: 160F (71C) at the centre. Pork sausage meat should show no pink juices.
- Sausage-meatVictorian sausage meat was seasoned pork, usually fairly fatty, often with rusk or breadcrumb and sage or mace already worked in. Bulk breakfast sausage is the nearest modern equivalent; plain ground pork will need salt, pepper and sage of your own.
- The dishA deep pie dish or a 1 lb loaf tin per pound of meat gives a cake that holds its shape. Butter it well, as the recipe says, or the loaf will not turn out cleanly.
- DrainingExpect a considerable pool of rendered fat. Pour it off before turning the loaf out, and keep a spoonful or two to enrich the gravy served round it.
- SteamingThe steamed version wants a covered basin over simmering water and will take longer than the baked hour, perhaps an hour and a half. It gives a paler, softer result.
- Resting and servingLet the loaf stand ten minutes before turning out or it will crack. Two pounds serves four to six, hot with gravy or cold in slices the next day.
- The price10d. per pound is a shilling-and-under dish, which is exactly why it sits here: this is thrift cookery dressed up with a tureen of gravy.
Cassell's gives two versions of sausage-meat cakes, and this is the second of them: no shaping, no frying pan, just the whole batch pressed into a dish and left to bake. Sausage meat sold loose by the pound was a staple of the British butcher's counter through the nineteenth century, and cookery writers of the period found various uses for it as a stuffing, a forcemeat and, as here, a dish in its own right. The instruction to send more gravy in a tureen is a small piece of Victorian table manners rather than cookery, and the alternative of steaming over boiling water points to households where oven space was contested or the range was not lit for a single dish.