Beef Sausages
INGREDIENTS. - To every lb. of suet allow 2 lbs. of lean beef; seasoning to taste, of salt, pepper, and mixed spices.
Clear the suet from skin, and chop that and the beef as finely as possible; season with pepper, salt, and spices, and mix the whole well together. Make it into flat cakes, or put it in well-cleansed skins, and fry of a nice brown. Many persons pound the meat in a mortar after it is chopped, but this is not necessary when the meat is minced finely.
TIME.-10 minutes to fry.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain uncured sausage meat: two parts lean beef to one part beef suet, seasoned and either shaped into patties or filled into casings. The proportions are the recipe; everything else is technique.
- The ratio is the point1 lb suet to 2 lbs lean beef is roughly 33 per cent fat, which is high by modern habit. Lean mixtures tend to fry dry and crumbly, so there is a case for not trimming the fat down.
- Suet vs. ordinary fatBeef suet is the hard kidney fat, firmer and higher-melting than the fat trimmed off a steak. Ask a butcher for fresh suet, not the shredded packet suet sold for puddings, which is coated with flour; the vegetable version sold alongside it is not beef fat at all.
- Chopping and the mortarMrs Beeton's "as finely as possible" means hand-chopping with a heavy knife. A meat grinder on a coarse plate does the job, or brief pulses in a food processor with the meat and suet well chilled; warm fat smears rather than cuts and the sausage weeps in the pan.
- Keep everything coldChill the beef, the suet and the grinder parts before you start, and work quickly. Fat that stays in distinct particles gives a juicy sausage; fat that has softened and emulsified into the lean gives a greasy one.
- Seasoning to tasteNo quantities are given; the recipe leaves it to the cook. A useful modern baseline is 1.5 to 2 per cent salt by weight of meat: about 20 g, or 3 to 4 tsp fine salt, per 3 lbs of mixture, plus pepper and mixed spice to taste. Fry a teaspoon of the mixture to taste before shaping the rest.
- "Mixed spices"Nineteenth-century mixed spice was generally along the lines of mace, nutmeg, cloves and allspice, sometimes with ginger, though blends varied. Mace and nutmeg are the flavours that read as old-fashioned sausage; a shop-bought mixed spice or pudding spice is a reasonable stand-in.
- Casings"Well-cleansed skins" are natural hog or sheep casings, now sold salt-packed. Rinse and soak them in cool water for half an hour before filling, and do not overstuff, or they split as the filling swells in the pan.
- Ten minutes to fryThat is about right for a patty or a thin sausage over moderate heat, turning once, but cook to temperature rather than clock: minced beef should reach 71C/160F throughout. Grinding spreads any surface bacteria through the whole mass, so a rare interior is not the same proposition as a rare steak.
- Yield and keepingThree pounds of mixture makes roughly a dozen substantial patties. Because there is no cure or preservative here, treat it as fresh minced meat: refrigerate and use within two days, or freeze.
Beef sausages sit slightly apart from the pork sausages that dominate British butchery. What is notable is what the recipe lacks: no saltpetre, no smoking, no drying, no bread or rusk. This is a fresh sausage meant to be made and eaten within a day or two, the sort of thing a cook produced from a cheap cut and the kidney fat that came with it, and the entry is marked "seasonable at any time". The line about pounding the meat in a mortar says only that the labour is unnecessary when the meat is minced finely — whether by hand or by machine it does not say. The rusk and breadcrumb fillers that later became standard in British commercial sausages, and that wartime regulation would eventually formalise, are entirely absent here.