Home › O › Oysters, Sausages of
Oysters, Sausages of
INGREDIENTS for sausages for 6 persons.-2 dozen oysters, 1 lb. of veal, lb. o suet, 1 egg, 1 slice of bread, some butter, seasoning. INGREDIENTS for sausages for 6 persons.—2 dozen oysters, 1 lb. of veal, 1/4 lb. of suet, 1 egg, 1 slice of bread, some butter, seasoning. AVERAGE COST, 3s.
AVERAGE COST, 33.
Open the oysters, saving the liquor and taking off the beards. Mince the veal and suet finely, then pound then with the oysters to a paste. Soak thelread in the liquor from the oysters, and add that to the paste, pounding it in anl adding a seasoning of pepper and salt. Bind the mixture with the egg, beaten, and form into small rolls the size of sausages. Fry in butter a bright golden brown, and serve hot with brown bread-and-butter, and a cut lemon.
TIME.-10 minutes to fry the scusages.
SEASONABLE from September to April.
A Victorian forcemeat sausage, skinless, bound with egg and fried. It is essentially a veal quenelle mixture carrying oysters, and it stands or falls on the pounding.
- The hinge: pound to a true pasteVeal, suet and oysters need to be worked to a smooth, sticky paste or the rolls break apart in the pan. A food processor will do in seconds what the mortar did by hand; pulse the chilled veal and suet first, then add the oysters and run to a paste.
- Suet quantityThe fat measurement has lost its fraction in this text. Victorian forcemeats of this kind ran anywhere from a quarter to half a pound of suet to a pound of veal; 4 oz of shredded beef suet gives a sausage that holds together and stays moist.
- Oysters and their liquorTwo dozen shucked oysters is roughly a pint of meats plus their liquor. "Taking off the beards" means trimming the dark frilly mantle edge, which stays tough; buy them shucked with liquor if you would rather not open them.
- The breadA slice of stale white bread, crusts off, soaked in the strained oyster liquor. It is a panade and it is what keeps the mixture tender. If the liquor does not wet it through, add a spoonful of milk rather than water.
- FryingTen minutes in butter over moderate heat is right for sausages about the thickness of a thumb; turn them so all sides colour. Butter alone will brown fast, so add a little neutral oil to raise the smoke point. Veal must reach 71C/160F in the centre.
- ShapingChill the paste for half an hour before rolling. Wet hands, or a light dusting of flour, stop it sticking; the mixture is deliberately soft and will not behave like butcher's sausage meat.
- Yield and servingThe recipe is headed for 6 persons; it does not say how many sausages that makes, though the quantity suggests three or four small ones each. The brown bread-and-butter and lemon are not garnish but the whole accompaniment, in the manner of a fish course.
- "Seasonable September to April"The old rule about months with an R, when native oysters were out of spawn and cold transport was unreliable. Farmed oysters are sold year-round now, though wild native beds are still closed in summer.
Oysters were cheap, plentiful and worked into everything in nineteenth-century British cookery, from steak pies to sauces to stuffings for boiled fowl, and Mrs Beeton's book is full of them. Sausages of this kind, skinless forcemeat rolls fried in butter, belong to a family of dishes that also gave us oyster fritters and oyster patties, all of them ways of stretching a shellfish that was still working-class food into something for a dressed table. The veal and suet base is standard Victorian forcemeat, the same mixture that filled quenelles and stuffed veal; the oysters carry the flavour and the veal simply gives it body. Oysters have moved a long way up the scale since: by the time this recipe reached later editions, the great English beds had been fished thin and the price was climbing.