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Sausage Rolls
Make a dough as for biscuits. Roll thin and cut into large rounds. Spread one-half thickly with sausage meat and turn the other side over. Pinch edges together and put in a baking pan, Bake half hour. Nice with meat course.
T Fall Fairs throughout Canada, FIVE ROSES prizes in open competition against all comers. Not only for breads, but for biscuits, cakes, pastry and all other forms of flour foods. Many of these prize recipes earned a place in the FIVE ROSES cook book. 1 egg
A turnover of raw sausage meat in baking-powder biscuit dough, written in the shorthand of a book that assumed you already knew its biscuit recipe. Two things need pinning down: the oven and the doneness of the pork.
- The dough"A dough as for biscuits" means a plain baking-powder biscuit dough. A period-typical formula runs to about 2 cups flour, baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 2 to 4 tablespoons fat cut in, and enough milk to make a soft dough; the book's own proportions are not given on this page. It is not yeast dough and not puff pastry, despite the modern British association of the name.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Biscuit dough is generally baked at 400-425F; at that heat half an hour is plausible for a filled round, with the dough browned and firm on the bottom.
- The hinge: raw pork inside doughThe filling is uncooked sausage meat sealed in pastry, so the dough can look finished before the centre is. Check the meat itself reaches 160F on a thermometer rather than judging by the crust.
- Roll thin, spread thick — within reasonA thick pad of raw sausage will not cook through in the time the dough takes to brown. Keep the layer under about 1/2 inch, or brown the sausage meat first and treat the bake as heating through.
- Size and yield"Large rounds" is not defined; a 4 to 5 inch cutter is a reasonable modern reading, folding into a half-moon. A batch of biscuit dough of the size above might yield somewhere around 8 to 10 rolls.
- SealingPinching alone tends to spring open as the sausage renders fat and steam. Brush the border with water or beaten egg before folding, then crimp with a fork, and leave the pan unlined edges apart so grease can escape.
- Stray text in the originalThe lines about fall fairs and prize recipes are advertising copy from the page, and the trailing "1 egg" belongs to the neighbouring recipe. Neither is part of these rolls, though an egg wash is a sensible addition.
- Sausage meat todayBulk breakfast sausage is the closest match to what the book meant: seasoned ground pork with no casing. Squeeze links out of their skins if bulk is unavailable.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and the collection leaned heavily on recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, including ones that had taken prizes at fall fairs, as the page itself boasts. The recipe's brevity may owe something to that origin: a contributor writing to another cook might have seen no reason to spell out biscuit dough or name an oven temperature. Sausage rolls in Britain are usually made with puff or flaky pastry, but the baking-powder biscuit version here reflects a North American kitchen where chemical leavening was cheap and quick. Suggesting them "with the meat course" rather than as a snack places them as a hot savoury accompaniment, in the manner of dumplings or hot rolls at a farmhouse dinner.