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Sausage-Meat Cakes
Make the sausage-meat in the usual way, and allow two parts of lean to one of fat. Season nicely, and after mincing the meat pound it lightly in a mortar. Make it up into round cakes; flour these, and fry them in hot fat till they are lightly browned on both sides. Take them up, drain them on a sieve, and serve on a hot dish. Send brown sauce to table with them. If liked, the sausage-cakes can be placed round a dish with mashed potatoes in the centre. Time to fry, ten minutes. Probable cost, 10d. to 1s. per pound.
A skinless sausage patty, fried and served with gravy. The recipe assumes you already know how to make sausage-meat, so the useful work here is filling in the ratios, the seasoning and the doneness test.
- The fat ratio is the hingeTwo parts lean to one part fat by weight — roughly 33 per cent fat, which is what keeps the cakes juicy. Supermarket ground pork is usually leaner than that; buy pork shoulder and have it coarsely ground, or add back a proportion of fatback or unsmoked belly.
- "Season nicely""Season nicely" leaves the mixture to the cook; period English sausage seasoning was typically salt and pepper with some combination of sage, mace, nutmeg or thyme, though Cassell's specifies nothing here. About 1.5 teaspoons fine salt per pound of meat is a reasonable starting point; season the rest to taste, frying a teaspoon of the mixture to check before shaping.
- Pounding in a mortarThe point is to work the meat until it becomes slightly tacky and binds without egg or breadcrumbs. A food processor does it in short pulses, or knead the ground meat by hand for a minute in a cold bowl. Stop as soon as it holds together; overworking with warm meat breaks the emulsion and the fat renders out in the pan.
- Shape and flouringCakes about 2.5 to 3 inches across and half an inch thick suit the ten-minute fry. A light dusting of plain flour dries the surface and gives a better crust; shake off the excess or it will scorch in the fat.
- Frying and donenessTen minutes total over medium heat is about right for cakes of that thickness — high heat browns the outside before the centre sets. Pork mince must reach 160F (71C) at the centre.
- Brown sauceIn this book that means a flour-and-stock brown sauce or espagnole, not bottled steak sauce. Deglazing the frying pan with a little stock and thickening it makes a plausible substitute and wastes nothing.
- Cost and yieldThe "10d. to 1s. per pound" is the price of the sausage-meat in late-Victorian pence and is only of historical interest. The recipe gives no yield; a pound of meat would make roughly half a dozen cakes of the size suggested.
Sausage-meat cakes belong to the long English tradition of skinless sausage — the mixture made and cooked without casings, which was the practical option in a domestic kitchen with no sausage machine and no reliable supply of cleaned intestine. The two-to-one lean-to-fat proportion is a common one in nineteenth-century cookery books, the point at which pork forcemeat is held to stay succulent rather than turning dry and crumbling. The arrangement of cakes in a ring around a centre of mashed potato is a familiar Victorian service style, often described as serving something "in a border"; it made a modest amount of meat look like a composed dish. The price note, given in pence and shillings, was a routine feature of Cassell's entries and let a household cook budget a meal before she began.