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Sausages, Tomato
To four pounds of pork sausage-meat allow twelve ounces of tomato-pulp. To prepare the latter, put some ripe tomatoes in a stewpan and cook until soft. Pass through a sieve to leave skins and seeds behind. Put the pulp into the pan, with salt and cayenne and a pinch of white sugar. Stir and boil for about ten minutes, then turn out into an earthen vessel to get cold before mixing it with the pork. It must be weighed after cooking and cooling. These sausages should be freshly made as required. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
A fresh sausage mixture rather than a cured one, and the whole thing turns on the tomato being cooked down and cooled before it ever touches the pork.
- Weigh the pulp after cookingThe 12 oz is the finished, reduced, cooled pulp, not the raw fruit. Expect to start with roughly 2½–3 lb of ripe tomatoes to land there, depending on how watery they are.
- Why it must be coldWarm pulp softens the fat in the sausage-meat and smears it, which gives a greasy, crumbly sausage that weeps in the pan. Chill the pulp thoroughly, and keep the pork cold while mixing.
- The ten-minute boilTen minutes is a guide, not a rule. Reduce until the pulp mounds on a spoon and no free liquid runs out; excess moisture is the main cause of a mixture that will not bind.
- ProportionsTwelve ounces to four pounds is a little under 19 per cent of the meat's weight (about 16 per cent of the finished mixture) — enough to colour and flavour without wrecking the texture. Scale down to 3 oz pulp per 1 lb of meat for a smaller batch.
- Sausage-meatSausage-meat of this period would have been distinctly fatter than modern lean mince, though no fixed proportion is recorded. Supermarket lean mince will give a dry result; ask for coarse-ground shoulder, or add back fat.
- SeasoningThe salt and cayenne here season the pulp only. The sausage-meat as sold is usually already seasoned, so fry a teaspoon of the finished mixture and taste before making up the rest.
- "Freshly made as required"There is no cure, no nitrite and no preservative in this, and the added tomato raises the moisture. Treat it as fresh raw pork: keep refrigerated, use within a day, and cook right through to 71°C/160°F.
- Yield and costFour pounds plus pulp makes roughly 30 sausages at a modest 2½ oz each. The "1s. per pound" is the book's own probable-cost estimate and has no modern equivalent worth quoting.
The "probable cost" formula and dictionary-entry form are characteristic of Cassell's, and this entry is laid out much like a trade formula: a bulk weight of meat, a fixed weight of flavouring, and a note of the cost per pound. Tomatoes were still a comparative novelty in the ordinary British kitchen through much of the nineteenth century, moving from the hothouse and the sauce bottle onto the everyday table as imports and cheaper glasshouse cultivation spread; by the time this dictionary appeared they were common enough to be pulped into a meat mixture without further comment. Sieving out skins and seeds is characteristic of period cookery, and the instruction to weigh the pulp after reduction removes any ambiguity about which weight is meant.