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University Pork Sausages
To a couple of pounds of lean pork, young, white, and delicate, put three-quarters of a pound of minced beef suet--the pork must first be chopped very fine. Add three dessert-spoonfuls of bread which has been dipped in port wine, idried, and grated fine. Work all together with the yolks of three eggs smoothly beaten; season with pepper and salt and dried sage--a very little cayenne may be introduced, and a very small piece of garlic. Continue working the whole in a mortar until it forms a paste; then put it into wide skins, or into jars for future use. It is cut into square pieces, dredged with flour, fried in fresh butter, and sent to table on a toast.
A rich forcemeat sausage in the eighteenth-century manner: finely chopped rather than coarsely ground, bound with egg, and pounded to a paste. Most of what needs translating here is measurement and storage.
- Dessert-spoonfulsA dessertspoon is 2 teaspoons, so three of them is about 2 tablespoons of dried, grated crumb. That is a modest amount of binder for 2 lb of meat, which is the point -- this is meat held together by egg, not a bready sausage.
- The port-soaked crumbDip slices of stale white bread in port, dry them out (a 200F oven for half an hour works), then grate. Drying before grating is what keeps the wine flavour without making the mixture wet.
- SuetThree-quarters of a pound of beef suet to two pounds of lean pork is roughly a 27 percent fat mixture, which is right for sausage. Shredded packet suet behaves differently from fresh caul or kidney fat; ask a butcher for fresh beef fat and mince it cold. Cold, hard fat is essential or the paste smears.
- Seasoning, unmeasuredThe original gives no quantities. For 2 lb of pork reckon on about 2 teaspoons salt, a teaspoon of black pepper, a teaspoon of dried sage, a pinch of cayenne and one small clove of garlic. Fry a teaspoon of the mixture to taste before you fill anything.
- Mortar or processorChop the pork fine by hand or ask for a coarse mince, then pound or pulse to a paste. A food processor does this in seconds but will warm the fat; work in short bursts with everything refrigerator-cold, or the emulsion breaks and the sausages weep in the pan.
- Skins or jars"Wide skins" most likely means hog casings, or something similarly large, rather than the narrow sheep casings used for breakfast links. The jar version is simply loose sausage meat packed down for slicing -- it is not a preserving method, despite the original's "for future use." Refrigerate and use within two days, or freeze.
- CookingCut squares about half an inch thick, flour them, and fry gently in butter -- too high a heat and the butter blackens before the pork is done. Cook to an internal 160F; the interior should show no pink.
- YieldAbout 2 3/4 lb of sausage meat, enough for six to eight as a supper dish with the toast.
Named sausages were a small English genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and this one belongs beside the Oxford and Cambridge sausages that Cassell's and some of its rivals print: skinless or wide-skinned, pale, heavily herbed, and made with a proportion of suet rather than pork fat alone. The "university" label may well signal that pattern rather than any particular college kitchen. What marks this version as an older recipe surviving into a Victorian dictionary is the mortar: pounding meat to a smooth paste is forcemeat technique, the same handling that produced quenelles and veal stuffings, and it predates the domestic mincing machine, which is often credited with the spread of coarse-textured sausage. The port-steeped bread and the toast beneath are of a piece with that -- this is a dish meant for a dinner table, not a farmhouse breakfast.