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Summer Breakfast Sausage
Take equal parts of beef, pork and breadcrumbs. Fresh pork, salted pork or bacon may be used. Put all through the mincing machine. Season with salt and pepper.
Beat up an egg and add to the mixture.
Press into a firm roll, tie in a thickly floured cloth, plunge into boiling water and cook for 24 hours. Turn out when cooked, and drain. Nice cold or hot. -Mrs. R. A. Sim, Rathmullen, Sask.
A boiled meat roll rather than a linked sausage — no casings, no smoking, just a seasoned forcemeat tied in a cloth and simmered. Straightforward, with one number in the original that cannot be taken at face value.
- The cooking timeThe printed page was checked and the boiling time is as our text now gives it. Judge by size in any case: a roll of about 3 inches diameter needs roughly 1.5 to 2 hours at a bare simmer, until the centre reads 160F.
- Simmer, do not boil hardThe recipe says plunge into boiling water, and that is the right start, but bring it back down at once. A rolling boil bursts the cloth and pushes fat and juice out of the loose forcemeat.
- The floured cloth"Thickly floured" is not fussiness — the flour forms a paste skin that seals the surface and stops water getting into the meat. Use a clean, closely woven cotton or linen cloth, dip it in hot water, wring it, then dust the inside heavily with flour before rolling and tying both ends.
- Equal parts breadcrumbsOne-third breadcrumbs is a lot by modern taste and reads as filler; it is what makes the roll slice cleanly cold. Use dry crumbs, not fresh, or the texture goes pasty. Halving the crumbs gives a meatier result but a more crumbly slice.
- Mincing machineA stand-mixer grinder or a food processor pulsed in short bursts does the same job. Grind the beef and pork together once through a coarse plate, then mix the crumbs, egg and seasoning in by hand.
- Seasoning when salt pork or bacon is usedIf you take the salted pork or bacon option, cut the added salt back sharply — about half a teaspoon per pound of total mixture — and taste-check by frying a small patty before you commit the whole roll to the cloth.
- Yield and servingScaled to two pounds of meat plus crumbs, the roll serves six to eight. Cool it under light weight overnight for firm cold slices; served hot it wants mustard or a sharp catsup.
- Keeping it, despite the name"Summer" here appears to mean a cold breakfast dish for warm weather rather than a preserve. There is no cure and no smoke in it, so treat it as cooked fresh meat: refrigerate promptly and eat within three or four days.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, and much of it was gathered from the company's own customers — hence the signature, Mrs. R. A. Sim of Rathmullen, Saskatchewan, a small prairie settlement whose name is often said to be of Irish origin. The dish belongs to the old British tradition of cooking a meat mixture in a floured pudding cloth, the same technique used for suet and plum puddings, applied here to a forcemeat. A roll like this turned trimmings of beef and pork plus stale bread into something that sliced neatly when cold.