Beef Sausage
Take tough beef and run it through a sausage machine. Form the pulp into shapes an inch thick, and the size of a common beefsteak. Season to the taste.--Mrs. C.
Three sentences that amount to a hamburger patty a decade or so before anyone called it that. The gaps — fat, cooking, doneness — are yours to fill.
- The sausage machineA hand-cranked tinned-iron mill clamped to the table edge, with a coarse plate. A modern grinder or a grinder attachment does the same job; the coarse plate is the right choice here, not the fine one.
- "Tough beef" means what it saysChuck, round, shin or trimmings — the cuts too sinewy to broil whole. Grinding is the point of the recipe: it breaks the connective tissue mechanically so a cheap cut eats like a steak.
- Add fatLean round ground alone gives a dry, crumbly patty. Aim for roughly 20 percent fat by weight — either grind in beef suet or fatty chuck trimmings, or choose a cut that already carries it.
- "Season to the taste"For a pound of meat, start with a teaspoon of salt and a half teaspoon of black pepper. Other period cookbooks season similar minced-beef mixtures with a little grated onion, a pinch of powdered sage or thyme, and sometimes a spoonful of cream; the recipe itself specifies nothing.
- The size givenAn inch thick and the size of a common beefsteak means a patty of about 6 oz, four inches across. A pound of meat makes two or three.
- Cooking, which the recipe omitsSear in a hot heavy pan or over coals, three to four minutes a side. Ground beef should reach 160F internally — unlike a whole steak, the surface bacteria are distributed all through it.
- HandlingWork the seasoned meat only enough to distribute the salt. Overmixed ground beef sets up springy and dense, closer to a meatloaf than a steak.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, drawing on contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, credited variously by initials, full names, and place names, as "Mrs. C." is here. The recipe belongs to the brief moment when the domestic sausage mill — a cheap cast-iron clamp-on device often said to have made its way into American kitchens in the years after the Civil War — made it possible to redeem tough meat at home rather than sending it to a butcher. Dishes of exactly this shape appear elsewhere in period cookbooks as "Hamburg steak," often recommended for invalids and dyspeptics on the theory that pre-minced meat was easier to digest; the name is generally traced to the beef preparations associated with the port of Hamburg and its emigrant trade. What is missing from this entry is as telling as what is in it: Mrs. C. assumed her reader knew perfectly well how to cook a piece of beef an inch thick, and saw no reason to say so.