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Veal Sausages, with Pork
Take equal quantities of veal and pork. Mince them, first separately and afterwards together, and with them half their weight in beef suet free from skin and fibre. With every pound of meat put a tea-spoonful of powdered sage, and season the mixture rather highly with pepper and salt. Clean and fill the skins in the usual way, and the sausages are made. If they are to be used immediately, a little crumb of bread soaked in water may be beaten up with the other items.
A plain fresh sausage with no cure in it, which means it is raw meat and must be treated as such. The proportions are the whole recipe: two parts lean meat to one part hard fat.
- The ratioEqual veal and pork, plus half the combined weight in suet — so 8 oz veal, 8 oz pork, 8 oz suet. That works out to roughly a third fat by weight, which is about right for sausage; much less and veal's leanness makes the result dry and crumbly.
- Beef suetAsk a butcher for hard kidney suet, not the boxed shredded suet sold for pastry, which is usually mixed with flour or is vegetable fat. If suet is unavailable, hard pork back fat is the closer substitute in flavour and behaves the same way in the grinder.
- Mince cold"Mince them, first separately and afterwards together" means two passes; the second is what distributes veal, pork and suet evenly, and may also have been a finer grind. Whatever grinder you use, have the meat and fat near freezing and the grinder parts chilled; warm fat smears rather than cuts and the cooked sausage will be greasy and dense.
- SageA teaspoon of powdered sage per pound of meat is assertive by modern taste. Half that is a reasonable starting point, with about 1½ teaspoons salt and ½ teaspoon black pepper per pound.
- Test before you fillFry a flattened teaspoon of the mixture and taste it before any of it goes into casings. "Season rather highly" is unquantified, and the raw mix is no guide to how the cooked sausage will taste.
- Casings"The usual way" assumed a household that knew it. Natural hog casings come packed in salt; rinse, soak in warm water 30 minutes, flush the insides, then thread onto the horn and fill without overstuffing so the links can be twisted without bursting.
- The soaked breadThe crumb is a binder and extender, and the recipe rightly limits it to sausages eaten at once — bread holds moisture and shortens keeping time. The recipe says only "a little"; roughly an ounce of crumb per pound of meat is enough to notice.
- Raw and uncuredThere is no saltpetre or nitrite here, so this is fresh sausage, not a keeping sausage. Refrigerate and cook within two days or freeze, and cook through to 160F; veal and pork mince are both surfaces ground inward.
- YieldThe recipe sets no quantity. A three-pound batch would give about 18 links at 2½ oz each, enough for six to eight at breakfast.
Sausage in Victorian England was largely a regional and seasonal matter, and veal sausages were generally reckoned a milder, paler article than the pork-and-rusk links sold by the pound. The book gives several variants in a row, and sage is the herb most bound up with English sausage — Lincolnshire is still defined by it, and Oxford sausage traditionally combines veal and pork with mixed herbs. Cereal binders were common in commercial sausage and were among the complaints aired in the food-adulteration debates from the 1850s onward, and the recipe is careful to say that if you add the crumb, the sausages should be eaten at once.