Home › The Principles of Cookery › SAUSAGE TOAST (a breakfast dish)
SAUSAGE TOAST (a breakfast dish)
Fry or bake two or three sausages. When done enough, strip the skin from them, and spread the meat on a slice of brown bread toasted and buttered. Grate a spoonful of Gruyere or Cheshire cheese over the meat, and serve hot. Time, fifteen to twenty minutes to fry the sausages. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for one person.
A one-person breakfast that needs almost no translation, though the sausages and the cheese both want a word.
- The sausagesVictorian breakfast sausages were generally fresh pork in a natural casing, and British ones commonly contained breadcrumb or rusk, so the meat tended to crumble readily once the skin came off. A modern banger or a plain fresh pork sausage behaves much the same way; a firm cured or emulsified sausage will not spread and defeats the point.
- Cooking timeFifteen to twenty minutes in a pan over gentle heat is right for a thick sausage and is not padding — the aim is cooked through without splitting the skin. Check for 70C/160F at the centre rather than watching the clock, and turn them often.
- Skinning themLet the sausages sit a minute off the heat before slitting the casing lengthways; scalding-hot meat tears and sticks to the skin. Mash the meat roughly with a fork as you spread it so it takes the butter from the toast.
- Brown breadIn a British book of this date brown bread would mean a wholemeal or wheatmeal loaf, not a sweetened American brown bread or a rye. A dense wholemeal slice, cut thick, holds the fat without collapsing.
- The cheeseGruyere gives nuttiness, Cheshire a dry saltiness and a crumb that scatters more evenly. 'A spoonful' grated is perhaps 5-10 g, depending on the spoon; either will melt in the residual heat, or the whole thing can go under a hot grill for a minute.
- Cost and yieldNinepence was a real breakfast expense in the period, not a token. As written it feeds one; scale sausage-for-slice.
Cassell's places this among the plainest of its breakfast dishes — a formula rather than a recipe, of the kind that filled out the morning table in households that ate a cooked breakfast every day and could not face a fresh idea before nine. Its logic is thrift: two or three sausages, which alone would look meagre on a plate, are stretched across toast and given a savoury lift with grated cheese, a trick the same books apply to anchovy, kidney and the ends of cold game. The instruction to strip the skin is worth noting: sausage casings then were natural gut, sometimes tough and often thicker than what a modern butcher uses, and the skin had to come off before the meat could be mashed into a paste for toast or patties. Gruyere and Cheshire appear as alternatives because one was an imported melting cheese used in British kitchens and the other a domestic hard cheese found almost everywhere.