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Sausages, Fried
Melt a little butter in a frying-pan, and as soon as it is dissolved put in the sausages in a single layer. Dredge flour over them, and fry over a very gentle fire till they are browned, moving them about, that they may be equally coloured all over. Drain the fat from them by laying them on a hair sieve before the fire for a minute or two, and serve them on a toast, or round a mould of mashed potatoes. Send sauce to table in a tureen (see SAUSAGES, SAUCE FOR). As sausages, especially when made of pork, need to be well cooked, care must be taken to heat them very gradually, so that they may not be burnt outside before they are done enough in the centre. When the oven is moderately heated, they may with advantage be baked instead of fried. Time to fry, fifteen to twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. per pound. Sufficient, a pound of sausages for three persons.
A plain method that still holds up: the whole point is slow, even heat so the centre cooks before the skin scorches. A few of the period's terms and assumptions need translating.
- Gentle fire means low heatSet the pan over medium-low and give it the full fifteen to twenty minutes. Modern pans and gas rings run far hotter than a Victorian range plate, and a hurried sausage splits and blackens while the middle is still pink.
- Cook pork sausages throughThe book insists only that they be "well cooked" and not raw in the centre; it gives no reason. Cook to 160F/71C at the centre for the coarse-ground fresh sausage this recipe assumes.
- The flour dredgeA light dusting of flour helps colour the skins and thickens the pan residue slightly. It is optional with modern sausages, whose skins brown readily; skip it if you want a cleaner crust.
- Butter in the panOnly enough to stop sticking. The sausages render fat of their own, which is why the recipe has you drain them afterwards; a teaspoon of butter or oil is sufficient before the fat starts to run.
- Hair sieveA fine sieve woven from horsehair, used for draining and sifting. Kitchen paper on a warm plate does the same job.
- Baking insteadThe book gives no temperature; a "moderate" oven is usually reckoned somewhere around 350F/180C. Bake on a rack over a tray, turning once, until browned and cooked through in the centre.
- Mould of mashed potatoesMashed potato pressed into a buttered basin, turned out onto the dish and the sausages laid around it. Warm the basin and the mash stiff, or it will slump.
- Yield and costA pound serves three at breakfast, or four alongside other dishes. The 1s. per pound is a late-Victorian British price and has no useful equivalent today.
Cassell's belongs to the great wave of late-Victorian household dictionaries, arranged alphabetically so a mistress or cook could look up a single word and find both method and expected cost — hence the "probable cost" and "sufficient for" lines appended to almost every entry. Fried sausages were breakfast and supper food alike, and fresh pork sausage of the period was commonly bought from a butcher who made his own, coarsely chopped and seasoned to no national standard. The word itself descends through Old French saussiche from Vulgar Latin salsicia, ultimately from salsus, salted, a reminder that the sausage began as a way of using and preserving trimmings. The instruction to send the sauce to table separately, in a tureen, reflects a service style in which sauces were often handed round rather than poured over the dish in the kitchen.