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SAUSAGES (American)
Pass four pounds of lean pork and two pounds of fat pork through a mincer. Mix together six tea-spoonfuls of dried sage, three tea-spoonfuls of black pepper, four and a half tea-spoonfuls of salt, half a nutmeg, grated, a small tea-spoonful of ground mace, and half a tea-spoonful of ground cloves, and add them to the minced pork, mixing thoroughly. The mixture may be put into sausage-skins and cooked in the usual way. To cook without skins, make it into cakes or sausage shapes, and fry them in a little hot fat. They are also excellent rolled in egg and cracker-crumbs, then dipped in melted fat, and baked or grilled. Probable cost, 3s. 6d.
A fresh sage sausage of the American breakfast type, unsmoked and uncured, meant to be cooked at once. The proportions scale cleanly, so it is worth reading them as rates per pound before you commit to six pounds of meat.
- The fat ratio is the hingeFour pounds lean to two pounds fat pork means a third of the mix by weight is the fat cut, though since 'fat pork' is not pure fat the finished fat content will be somewhat lower. Shoulder (Boston butt) comes close to the mark in one cut; if you use loin you will need to add back pure fatback.
- Salt levelFour and a half teaspoons of fine salt across six pounds is about 1 per cent by weight, on the low side by modern sausage practice, which usually runs 1.5 to 1.8 per cent. This is a seasoning quantity only, not a cure, and the meat must be treated as fresh.
- Sage measurementSix teaspoons of dried sage is the defining flavour. Rubbed sage is fluffy and measures light; ground sage is dense and will be markedly stronger for the same spoonful. Start with rubbed if you are unsure.
- Half a nutmegA whole nutmeg grates to roughly two teaspoons, so half is about one teaspoon. With the mace and cloves alongside it, the spicing is closer to an eighteenth-century English pork sausage than to most supermarket breakfast links.
- Mince and mix coldKeep the meat and fat near freezing through the grinder, or the fat smears and renders out in the pan. Mix only until the mass turns tacky and holds together; overworking a fresh sausage this coarse makes it rubbery.
- Fry a test pattyCook a small spoonful before stuffing or shaping the rest. Seasoning tastes flat in raw cold meat, and this is the only chance to correct the salt and sage.
- Cracker-crumbsPeriod cracker-crumbs mean crushed plain water biscuits or soda crackers, not sweetened crumbs. Panko or dry breadcrumbs stand in without complaint.
- Doneness and cookingGround pork is safe at 160F internal. Fry over moderate heat rather than high, or the outside colours long before the centre is through. The recipe gives no oven setting for the baked version; a moderate oven of around 375F for something like 25 minutes should suit inch-thick cakes, but go by internal temperature.
- Yield and keepingSix pounds of meat gives roughly 48 two-ounce patties, or about two dozen quarter-pound links. Fresh sausage is best used within a couple of days refrigerated; freeze what you will not eat, in portions.
Cassell's sorts its sausages by nationality, and what marks this one as American is the sage: a heavy hit of it, with the nutmeg, mace and cloves in a supporting role. Heavily saged fresh pork sausage of this type is associated with American farmhouse hog-killing, when sage was among the seasonings most likely to be dried and on hand, though the recipe itself says nothing of its origins. Sausage of this kind, with nothing in the mixture to preserve it, was a cold-weather food to be eaten quickly or packed down under lard. The instruction to roll the cakes in egg and cracker-crumbs and bake or grill them reads as a refinement for the British table, though that is inference rather than anything the book states. The probable cost of 3s. 6d. presumably covers the whole six pounds.