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Breakfast Dish (One pound pork sausage one)
One pound pork sausage, one tablespoonful pounded crackers, two well beaten eggs. Work thoroughly together, and make into cakes. These will to rather soft, but dropping each one into a plate of pounded or grated cracker will enable you to handle them. Put into a hot frying-pan. No lard is to be used, but keep the pan covered while frying.--Miss E.
A breakfast patty bound with egg and cracker, meant to be fried in nothing but its own fat. The instructions are complete as written; only the vocabulary and the doneness need translating.
- Pounded crackersPlain soda crackers or saltines, crushed fine in a bag with a rolling pin. About a tablespoon goes into the mixture and a shallow plateful is used for coating; count on roughly half a cup of crumbs for the dredge. Panko works but gives a coarser, crisper shell than the period intends.
- Sausage to buyUse bulk breakfast sausage rather than links squeezed from their casings, which tend to be more heavily seasoned and more finely ground. Farm sausage of the period was generally fattier than supermarket bulk sausage; if yours is very lean the cakes will be dry and will want a little rendered fat in the pan after all.
- Why no lardThe sausage renders enough fat to fry itself, and added lard makes the egg-and-cracker coating greasy rather than crisp. Start over medium heat in a heavy or nonstick pan and let the first fat come out before the cakes begin to brown.
- The covered panThis is the hinge. The lid traps steam and cooks these thick, loose cakes through without scorching the crust. Keep it on for most of the cooking, then lift it for the last two or three minutes so the surface dries and crisps.
- DonenessFresh pork sausage should reach 160F at the center. For cakes about three-quarters of an inch thick, that is roughly five minutes a side over medium heat with the lid on; go by the thermometer rather than the clock, since egg and cracker make the interior look set before it is.
- Handling the mixtureThe warning that they will be "rather soft" is accurate. Chill the mixed sausage half an hour before shaping, and wet or oil your hands; the cracker dredge does the rest.
- YieldOne pound makes six to eight cakes, enough for three or four at breakfast.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is full of short recipes signed with an initial like this one, and the signature is part of the point: the book was a collective record of what particular households actually cooked. Fresh sausage was most plentiful at hog-killing time, and egg and cracker crumb would extend it. The recipe does not say why the mixture is left so soft; it simply offers the cracker dredge as the remedy. Home-raised hogs were often fatter than modern pork, which may be the reason no lard was thought necessary in the pan.