Home › Cookery › Oyster Sausage
Oyster Sausage
Chop one pint oysters, with one-quarter pound veal, and one-quarter pound suet.
Mix with bread crumbs, and pound all in a mortar. Season with salt and pepper, adding an egg, well beaten.
Make into cakes like pork sausage.--Mrs. E.
A Victorian forcemeat cake that leans on oysters for flavour and veal and suet for body. The original assumes you know to fry them, and never says so.
- The missing instructionNothing in the text tells you to cook the cakes. Fry them in butter or dripping over medium heat, three to four minutes a side, until browned and firm; the veal must reach 160F throughout.
- A pint of oystersThat is a standard shucked pint, about 475 ml; depending on size, somewhere between a dozen and two dozen oysters with their liquor. Drain them well before chopping or the mixture will be too loose to shape, and save the liquor for a sauce.
- Do not over-chop the oystersTexture -- The recipe directs you to pound everything together in the mortar, which will reduce the oysters to paste along with the veal and suet. If you would rather still meet pieces of oyster, chop them coarsely and fold them in after pounding; that is a departure from the original.
- SuetBeef suet is still sold by butchers and some supermarkets, shredded or in the block. Frozen suet grates easily. Cold unsalted butter or fatty ground pork will stand in, though the set is softer.
- The mortarPounding in a mortar was the usual way to work forcemeat smooth before mechanical grinders became common, alongside hand-mincing and sieving. A food processor does it in short pulses; over-run it and the veal turns to a rubbery emulsion.
- Bread crumbsNo quantity is given. Start with about a cup of soft fresh crumbs to a pint of oysters and add more only until the mixture holds a shape on the palm. Dry commercial crumbs absorb far more liquid and will make the cakes stodgy.
- SeasoningSalt lightly. Oysters and their liquor carry their own salinity, and the period taste for mace, cayenne or a little lemon zest suits this mixture well if you want more than pepper.
- YieldRoughly eight to ten cakes of two inches; enough for four as a main course with toast, or six as a first course.
Oysters were cheap protein along the tidewater Chesapeake through the nineteenth century, sold by the barrel, and Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) treats a pint of them as a flavouring rather than the centrepiece. The dish belongs to the older English forcemeat tradition, where meat, fat, crumbs and egg were pounded smooth in a mortar and then shaped, poached or fried; "sausage" here means the shape and the seasoning, not a cased link. Marion Cabell Tyree assembled the book from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, and the terse initials-only attribution to "Mrs. E." is typical of the collection.